Tuesday, 27 June 2017

TUESDAY, 27 JUNE 2017

TUESDAY, 27 JUNE 2017

Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Motions

Emirates Team New Zealand—America’s Cup Victory

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): I seek leave to move a motion without notice in recognition of Emirates Team New Zealand winning the America’s Cup in Bermuda.

Mr SPEAKER: Is there any objection to that course of action being followed? There is none.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I move, That this House congratulate the members of Emirates Team New Zealand on winning and reclaiming the America’s Cup in Bermuda this morning, and acknowledge the outstanding performance of chief executive Grant Dalton, skipper and sailing team director Glenn Ashby, helmsman Peter Burling, and the nearly 100 other team members on and off the water. What a truly fantastic performance we have witnessed over the last few weeks. Hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders have braved 5 a.m. starts, living and breathing every race, every start, every gybe, and every tack. At times, the young leadership, in the form of Peter Burling, looked more composed than we were.

Team New Zealand’s commanding 7-1 victory over Oracle this morning not only reinforces the importance of the long and deep sailing tradition in New Zealand; it shows how sporting success unites us as a country and promotes Brand New Zealand on the world stage. One of Team New Zealand members’ strengths is that they display that great national trait, Kiwi ingenuity. They are world leaders in sailing innovation and technology, if we ever doubted it. They are constantly finding new boundaries, like the cyclors, in their relentless pursuit of excellence. They have also shown they can overcome adversity, picking themselves up after the disappointment of San Francisco and coming back better than ever. The Auld Mug will now return to New Zealand and to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, where it sat proudly after victories in 1995 and 2000.

To Grant Dalton, the man who took on the challenge after the last devastating campaign, we salute you for your dedication and drive. To skipper Glenn Ashby, your leadership of a young team has been outstanding. To young helmsman Peter Burling, what an inspiration you are and what a future you have, following in the steps of other yachting greats in New Zealand.

The America’s Cup is one of the most difficult trophies in sport to win, and today it is New Zealand’s again, so congratulations, again, to the team. We are immensely proud of you. Your calmness under pressure, flawless sailing, brilliant teamwork, tactical mastery, and innovative genius has returned yachting’s greatest prize to New Zealand. Congratulations from all New Zealand.

ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I rise to add my congratulations on behalf of the Labour Party to the sentiments expressed by the Prime Minister for the outstanding achievement of Emirates Team New Zealand this morning, our time. This genuinely was a day when we would all rather be on the harbour.

It was a fantastic performance by Peter Burling and his team on the water. Let us not forget, also, the passion and determination of Grant Dalton, who held that syndicate together between the regattas, and also Sir Stephen Tindall, who stepped in to make sure that Grant Dalton had the resources to hold it together and so that we had a challenge ready to go for this year. I wrote to Grant Dalton last week to wish him all the best for the remaining races. He wrote back to me and said: “We still have a steep hill to climb.” So he will be very pleased that they have knocked that bastard off.

The race and the result this morning confirm that we are a nation of sailors. And you look at the work of Peter Burling and his incredible level-headedness and the great humility that he showed—in fact, both Jimmy Spithill and Peter Burling demonstrated the wisdom of Rudyard Kipling’s words about greeting triumph and disaster as the imposter that it is. This is also a time to reflect on the leadership of great sailors like Sir Peter Blake, who has been very much the author of our passion in this particular race.

Of course, it was not just about the talent of the sailors on the water. It is also about the technology too, and you look at the New Zealand boat builders and the component builders here who have contributed so much—Southern Spars, for example, which I had the privilege of visiting last year. We have become world leaders in boat design—the boats that actually participated in those races, with their foils, with the Xbox-style controllers. That has given heart to generations of young people playing games at homes now, that they might have a future in something other than sitting in front of a TV in their parents’ front living room. So that might give hope as well. And even the broadcast technology for it that we watched, that made it so watchable and easy to follow what was happening. That stems from innovation from New Zealand, with the great work of Ian Taylor and his Animation Research Ltd.

We have much to be proud of in this race and the achievement that was made on behalf of this great nation this morning, and I extend my congratulations to the team—all of them; the 98 people involved in that syndicate—and look forward to hosting the race here in 4 years’ time.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, thank you. The Green Party is very pleased to support the motion and congratulate Emirates Team New Zealand. Its members have well and truly erased the heartache and despair of San Francisco 4 years ago. Their strength, their skill, and their resilience is astonishing. They overcame that heart-stopping bow-plant and capsize a fortnight ago to win the series. We congratulate Peter Burling on his extraordinary sailing and match-racing skills. His calm and grace on the water and his humility have resonated and inspired many.

I confess that I am not a great sports fan, but the chance to watch these boats fly, powered by the wind, water, and human muscle has certainly got me up early. This morning on Radio New Zealand Ian Taylor quoted Ernest Rutherford as saying: “We didn’t have the money, so we had to think.” That is the ethos behind Team New Zealand and one that we can celebrate more as the ethos of our country.

There is huge innovation in the boat and the way it was sailed and flown. We congratulate the lead designer, Dan Bernasconi, and everyone who helped design, engineer, and build this flying machine. And winning the America’s Cup should drive further innovation and export success in New Zealand’s boatbuilding industry and our developing aeronautical industry. That is something we can all be proud of.

I acknowledge Grant Dalton and his determination to bring the cup back to New Zealand. He has stayed on the rollercoaster and he has engaged supportive funders like Sir Stephen Tindall and Matteo de Nora. Grant Dalton and skipper Glenn Ashby have fostered extraordinary talent, enabling Team New Zealand to, in Peter Burling’s words, go to Bermuda and get the job done.

Aotearoa has world-leading sailors like Barbara Kendall, Jo Aleh, and Polly Powrie. With the America’s Cup being, reportedly, the world’s oldest international sports trophy, a women’s division in the competition is long overdue. It would be wonderful if cup organisers, Team New Zealand sponsors like Emirates and Nespresso, and Luna Rossa changed the rules, including perhaps the boat design rules, so that women can routinely compete in the America’s Cup. Our best women sailors should have the opportunity to be out there on the Waitematā.

Team New Zealand, you have done us proud—he waka eke noa, kia ora [a boat that has made it to the top, well done].

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): New Zealand First joins with the rest of New Zealand in saluting and congratulating Team New Zealand on their stunning success. Team New Zealand’s 2017 campaign for the America’s Cup had a Cinderella beginning, which lasted for 3 years, until the team arrived in Bermuda. Team New Zealand exemplified New Zealand’s can-do attitude, with a commitment to excellence and a combination of team genius and a brilliant helmsman in Pete Burling and fine management. They were all a credit, both on and off the water. This team exemplified all three: athleticism joined with science and technology. It was smarter, faster, and yet delightfully laid-back—Kiwi.

We want to also acknowledge the importance of Ian Taylor’s Animation Research Ltd for making this a spectacle that we could all understand and see the dimensions of.

I also want to repeat my personal thanks to Team New Zealand for hosting me at its Auckland headquarters and on the waters of the Waitematā in a sneak preview of its boat, Aotearoa, in preparation, shortly before it was packed up and freighted to Bermuda. It will always be a privileged memory.

Whilst we are at it, let us congratulate our own women’s rugby sevens team and Tyla Nathan-Wong on their brilliant success in winning the world series in sevens.

MARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Ever since the Endeavour was flying full pip down the East Coast of the North Island, and the little double-hulled waka of the Māori came out to meet them, went around them twice, and took off into the sunset—the double-hulled waka has been an innovation from all time. Right now, I am going to hold back on giving a bill to Team New Zealand for intellectual property, because we like innovation, we like to share, and we like to see New Zealanders having success on the world stage. So the Māori Party would like to join in congratulating Team New Zealand on a stirring campaign to once again make the America’s Cup “Aotearoa’s Cup”. We are so proud of this team.

Peter Burling has been spoken of as “feeling the water”, “feeling the current”, and “understanding the wind” like no other. He was raised on the water on a boat bought for him when he was just a child. We will not describe it how they have described it, but it obviously did him well because he, like those Polynesian navigators before him, has learned to transverse the waters by feeling the currents. He can be called—and I think he is dubbed this from this moment on—Aotearoa’s answer to Moana and Māui.

We do want to congratulate all the families that have supported these sailors, all the crew and the shore crew, and all of those who were on the boat, and recognise that innovation—what have they called them? Cyclors—more like cyclones. That is what I say—more like cyclones. Thirty years ago it was the “plastic fantastic”, and now we are ruling the world again with our innovation, which started thousands of years ago with the waka hourua. When all of those jetsetters come down here in about 4 years’ time and sail around our waters on their superyachts, will it not be great to stand up as a nation and say that we look after not only our sailors and our visitors but also our vulnerable children. Kia ora.

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): The ACT Party would like to join with New Zealand in congratulating Team New Zealand on this outstanding victory. Indeed, the America’s Cup has been a symbol of modern New Zealand. My first memories of sport in my life were the “plastic fantastic”, the farce of the catamaran, Dennis Conner walking out on Paul Holmes, and the court cases in New York. Who cannot remember Il Moro Challenge and the bowsprit controversy of 1992, before we finally, in red socks, brought the cup to its rightful home in 1995; the successful defence in the year 2000 on the waterfront; and the bitter loss to some traitorous former New Zealanders in 2003, before the wilderness years in Valencia; and the bitter, bitter, bitter disappointment that we suffered in 2013, when Steven Joyce went out on the water and it led to us losing time after time with enormous frustration.

In modern New Zealand we have all lived through the America’s Cup, but is it not wonderful to see a technologically advanced syndicate, a multinational syndicate, a syndicate that shows New Zealand leading the world and part of the world, and taking it to the best in the world and bringing the cup home.

What an example set by Peter Burling, and the character of a guy who has so much humility, who does his talking out on the water, and who performs at the best. We want, on behalf of the ACT Party, to congratulate Team New Zealand on this stunning success in this stunning showcase of a modern New Zealand. Thank you.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future): I too join with others in congratulating Emirates Team New Zealand on its success in the 35th America’s Cup, sailed in Bermuda. New Zealand first competed in the America’s Cup in 1986-87. In the 10 America’s Cup contests since that time, we have been the challenger or the defender on seven of those 10 occasions, and today was the 50th time that Team New Zealand, or a New Zealand team, has sailed in an America’s Cup final race. What an appropriate occasion that was to achieve what has perhaps been the most stunning victory of all. Yes, Team New Zealand over the years has been the innovator, right from the days of KZ-7 through to today, but the level of innovation, the level of technological supremacy, I think has surpassed everyone’s expectations.

How could it be that this little country at the end of the world can consistently put together technology, teams, and people who go into these contests and do so extremely well? I think sometimes in these situations we make the mistake of failing to appreciate the unique contribution that being New Zealanders makes to these types of events. These New Zealanders are extraordinary people, but they are extraordinary because they are New Zealanders, not in spite of that fact. It is the same sort of thing that sees Peter Beck and his team on the verge of launching rockets into space. It is that sense of spark, that innovation, and that devil-may-care attitude that says we can actually beat the odds here, be it NASA on the one hand or the might of Oracle and American money on the other.

Today is a huge triumph. It is built on the success of previous occasions, and I think it augurs extremely well both for the America’s Cup in New Zealand but also for sailing as a whole, and also for the support and enthusiasm of the next generation of young New Zealanders. My warmest congratulations to Emirates Team New Zealand and to everyone who has been part of it from the management down to the sailors, to the funders, and to the sheer legion of enthusiastic supporters up and down the country who have backed them every step of the way. When they return home in 10 days’ time and the victory parades start to take place, I have no doubt that they will match 1995 for their enthusiasm and their popular support. The America’s Cup will capture the public imagination in just the same way as it did then, and it will, in turn, inspire the up-and-coming New Zealand sailors, the Peter Burlings of the future, to even greater achievements on their behalf. Congratulations, Team New Zealand. Our thoughts are with you now, and our encouragement continues as the next stage of the journey begins.

Motion agreed to.

Speaker’s Rulings

Oral Questions—Prime Ministerial Responsibility

Mr SPEAKER: Before I call the Rt Hon Winston Peters to ask question No. 1, I wish to make some comments as to the text and scope of the question, and answers that might arise from supplementary questions. There has been some debate as to whether this question is so broad as to encompass responsibilities beyond being Prime Minister, and therefore encompassing comments made as a leader of a party or a former member of Parliament for a particular electorate.

The authentication provided refers to some answers given in the House last week by the Prime Minister and on his behalf, and it is on that basis that I accepted the question. I did ask Mr Peters to amend his question to clarify that it ask only about all statements made as Prime Minister. He declined to do so. Rather than rule the question out of order, because I do not believe that it serves this House well to have only 11 questions, I am repeating some of the fundamental rules of questions to Ministers, as set out in Standing Order 378, that they can relate only to “(a) public affairs with which the Minister is officially connected, or (b) proceedings in the House or any matter of administration for which the Minister is responsible.”

In doing so, I remind members of the advice I gave last week that they must be guided by Speakers’ rulings 172/2 and 172/3, and 173/1 and 173/2: the Prime Minister is not responsible to this House for a member of his caucus but is responsible for things he has said as Prime Minister. Answers to oral questions to Ministers in this House can be given only in a ministerial capacity.

While the primary question is therefore in order, I will listen carefully to supplementary questions from all members. Any question that I consider to be principally about caucus or party matters will be ruled out of order. Even when a supplementary question stands, if the Prime Minister does not consider that he has responsibility for the subject of the question, he may choose to reply to that effect. A reply that a Minister does not have responsibility for something is an answer in terms of the Standing Orders. The Speaker has no responsibility for the quality or content of an answer, provided it addresses the question asked.

CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The first thing is—I do not want to contradict anything that you have said in your ruling, but in making your decisions about which supplementary questions to accept, I would ask that you also consider that the Prime Minister is responsible for the conduct of Ministers in that role. That includes the conduct of himself in his previous role as Minister of Finance. The second thing I would ask you to consider in that light is the comment that the Prime Minister made on TVNZ’s Q+A programme in the weekend—and we can supply a transcript if necessary—that he was dealing with the Barclay matter in his capacity as the Minister of Finance. That was the comment he made on television, and therefore he could not say that on television and then assert something different in the House.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): I want to set the record straight because I have a full record of what occurred this morning with regard to you and your office. You will recall that you wanted me to add the words “in the House”. Knowing that I have 10,000 precedents—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I just want to clarify that—“in the House” or “as Prime Minister”. The member was given either choice.

Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Mr Speaker, I have not finished my point of order, and I was getting to that. The first statement is erroneous, and I have got 10,000 precedents on that, and then the second one was where you refer to “as the Prime Minister”. We made it very clear from reading the Speakers’ rulings—in particular, 173/2 and 173/3, and, further, 173/4—that when it relates to a party matter, that is not a proscription in the way that you sought to interpret it. That said, I want to ask a question in the same way as countless Prime Ministers, including this one, have been asked, as to what they have said. The proscription that you sought to place on it we will not accept, and we will go further on the matter if you insist upon it.

Mr SPEAKER: I thought if the member had listened to my ruling he would have understood the process that has unfolded. I am allowing the question. I will then listen carefully to all supplementary questions, and that is not only in relation to this question; it is in relation to question No. 3. If I feel there is no prime ministerial responsibility—in other words, it is talking about a matter of caucus or a matter of party funding, for example—I will rule it out.

There has now been considerable debate in the media, over more than a week, so in some cases it will be difficult for me to know the context in which the Prime Minister may have made some statements. I then may choose to leave the question as in order, and leave it for the Prime Minister then to answer as he sees fit. He may well take the opportunity to say that he did not make such a statement in a prime ministerial capacity. That will be for the Prime Minister to determine.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Todd Barclay—Southland Electorate Office Allegations, Prime Ministerial Conduct

1. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements on the Clutha-Southland electorate office issue; if so, how does he do that?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): Yes, in the context in which they were given. However, I point out that my statements were not made in my ministerial capacity as I do not have ministerial responsibility for this issue.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Which statement is he standing by today—is it: “It’s never been established that the alleged incident around the recording actually occurred.”, or “It was avoidable; it did not need to have all these implications.”, or “I don’t know what happened.”?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: As I said, those statements were not made in my ministerial capacity, and in the light of police reopening their investigation, I do not intend to add to them.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Is it not a fact, Prime Minister, that he turned down an opportunity to listen to the recording because Mr Barclay had already confirmed with him what was on that recording?

Mr SPEAKER: The right honourable Prime Minister, in so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have no ministerial responsibility for that, and I do not intend to add to the comments.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: When he said: “He left a dictaphone running that picked up all conversations in the office.”, and Mr Barclay offered to let him hear the recording, then why did he later say that he was unsure whether it even existed?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility, the right honourable Prime Minister.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: As I have said, those statements were not made in my ministerial capacity, and in the light of a reopening of the police investigation, I do not intend to add to the comments.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: If there is no sub judice rule around this matter at this point in time, and he claims he had no part in the employment dispute, and the settlement is confidential—his words—then why did he discuss details that he later claimed never to have been aware of?

Mr SPEAKER: The right honourable Prime Minister, in so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: As I have already pointed out to the member, I do not have ministerial responsibility for the matters to which he is referring. In the light of the reopened police investigation, I have nothing to add.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Why is he persisting with this line of ignorance, when in Glenys Dickson’s own words she says: “This is the same information that I had received from Bill English.”?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I can only repeat the substance of my previous answer.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: When he is, by the media’s judgment, guilty of misleading both them and Parliament regarding his involvement in this matter, why does he not just stand down like Todd Barclay did; or is there one rule for him and another for everyone else? [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! That question is completely out of order and I just refer the member to Speakers’ rulings 48.

Budget 2017—Commentary

2. MELISSA LEE (National) to the Minister of Finance: What feedback has he received from the public and businesses on Budget 2017?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): Since the Budget’s release, just over a month ago, it has attracted a positive response from a number of business organisations and from the public. International ratings agency Moody’s recently said that the Government’s prudent fiscal plan will continue to give us options to share the benefits of growth, as we saw with the Family Incomes Package. Recently, the OECD, in its country report, noted New Zealand’s strong economic growth and high employment as well as the low-inflation environment.

Melissa Lee: How have businesses in the regions reacted to the Budget?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Since 25 May I have given briefings to around 32 different business groups, social service provider groups, community groups, and iwi groups around the country, and the feedback has been very positive. The regions are performing well. Under this Government’s economic management, the New Zealand economy is up on its foils. Budget 2017 continues the Government’s strong plan to keep the economy growing, giving households and businesses the confidence to make further long-term investments in their future. There are still some challenges, though, notably the shortage of skilled workers in regional New Zealand.

Melissa Lee: What evidence are we seeing of further business growth?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: New Zealand’s stable economic plan and pro-trade policies mean that Kiwi companies and entrepreneurs are more outward looking than ever before. We see that in official figures but also at an individual firm - level. Last Friday, at the Bay of Plenty Export Awards, I met the entrepreneurs behind George & Willy—a local furniture company exporting to over 20 countries every year, and all at the tender age of 25 and as a result of an idea they had while at university in Dunedin. This is another example of how new New Zealand businesses are shaping globalisation to their advantage.

Melissa Lee: What risks are there to businesses’ confidence in the economy?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: There are both external and internal risks. Externally, we are subject, of course, to global events, but we are bolstering our resilience to these shocks by keeping the Government’s books in good order and reducing debt as a percentage of GDP. Internally, the biggest risk would be reversing the policies that have given businesses the confidence to invest and grow exports, such as closing the door on new trade deals or turning away skilled workers at the border. There are some commentators who do want a breather, and they want to slow down the economy to their pace. That is not the Government’s plan. Our plan is to drive New Zealand’s prosperity—something that everybody can share in.

Todd Barclay—Southland Electorate Office Allegations, Prime Ministerial Conduct

3. ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition) to the Prime Minister: Have all the answers given by him and given on his behalf to questions in this House regarding Todd Barclay been fully accurate and complete?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH (Prime Minister): Yes, to the best of my knowledge and in the context they were given.

Andrew Little: Why did he tell the House last Wednesday that he reported the matter to the police, when he knew that that answer was not truthful?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: That particular use of words was corrected by my colleague Gerry Brownlee, because it was correct to say that I answered the police’s questions—that is, I made a statement to the police.

Andrew Little: Why did he say last Tuesday that he did not know who told him about the tapes, when he knew that that answer was not truthful?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I disagree with the member’s statement, but I do agree with another one he made: “we must stop the abuse of the system by dodgy employers”—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! When I rise to my feet it is important that all members, including Ministers and Prime Ministers, then cease their answers. Further supplementary questions?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. At the beginning of question time today, you were at pains to point out the rules. Could you please tell me what part of the Prime Minister’s responsibility that was when he answered that question.

Mr SPEAKER: The member should go back and study Hansard like I do when it is published later on, and he will see—[Interruption] If the member is going to ask the point of order, then he should show some manners and wait for the answer. Then, if he goes back and studies, he will see that as soon as I saw the Prime Minister deviate off track, I rose to my feet immediately and his microphone was switched off so he could not continue with an answer that was not relevant to the question asked.

Andrew Little: Why did he say he did not know whether the tapes even existed, when, in fact, Todd Barclay had offered to play them for him, meaning he knew that that answer also was not truthful?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there is prime ministerial responsibility, the right honourable Prime Minister.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: In response to the leader of the “Free Foreign Labour Party”, can I say—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I just want an answer—[Interruption] Order! I just want an answer that addresses the question.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: There has been plenty of comment on that matter, and, in light of the police investigation, I do not intend to add to that comment.

Mr SPEAKER: Supplementary question, the Rt—Andrew Little. [Interruption] Order! We will just have the question without the interjections from my right. [Interruption]

Andrew Little: How many Young Nats have gone to help the Republicans? [Interruption] Given—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I do not want to be asking a senior Minister to leave the House, but Andrew Little was then responding to an interjection. It would be far better for the order of this House if there were substantially fewer interjections coming both from my right and from members to my left.

Andrew Little: Given the contents of the tapes have now been revealed to concern Todd Barclay and sex and drug matters, does he accept the tapes exist, and when was he aware of their contents?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility, the right honourable Prime Minister.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: As I have said, I have no comment to add to what comments have been made. But the member should, I would hope, be as forensic with his own statements about the free foreign labour and the idea—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I have asked for less interjection. I am not getting much cooperation from either side. If I therefore have to ask a member to leave the Chamber because the member continues to interject, then I would suggest that person not complain to me afterwards.

Andrew Little: Putting aside the Prime Minister’s admiration for my exemplary truthfulness—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! We will have the question.

Andrew Little: Why did he say—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Andrew Little: Why did he say he did not know anything about Glenys Dickson’s settlement, when he had earlier texted Stuart Davie that the settlement was larger than normal, meaning he knew that that answer also was not truthful?

Mr SPEAKER: I will allow the Prime Minister to address it, but it—[Interruption] Order! It is marginal that it does not breach—I suspect it breaches Speaker’s ruling 173/1, but I will allow the Prime Minister, if he wishes to address the question, to do so.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: Those matters have all been publicly commented on, and I do not intend to add to it.

Andrew Little: Is this an accurate time line of his statements as Prime Minister on this issue: last Tuesday he said he did not know who had told him about the tapes; later that day he said he remembered Todd Barclay had told him; last Wednesday he said he had reported the matter to the police; the next day he remembered it was the police who contacted him; on Saturday he did not know whether the tapes existed; and by Sunday he remembered that Todd Barclay had offered to play him the tapes? If so, why does his version of events about a potential crime committed by one of his MPs just keep on changing?

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: If it comes to time lines, that member had better be clear about the scale of immigration fraud—the scale of immigration fraud—to which he may be a party.

Andrew Little: Bearing in mind his own statement as Prime Minister that Ministers should be truthful, can he be straight with me: does he know whether any person suggested Todd Barclay destroy the tapes that were the subject of a now reopened police investigation; if so, who was that person?

Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there may be prime ministerial responsibility, the right honourable Prime Minister.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: I certainly have no ministerial responsibility for that, although that leader has responsibility—

Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! Carmel Sepuloni will stand, withdraw, and apologise for that interjection immediately.

Carmel Sepuloni: I withdraw and apologise.

Mr SPEAKER: Now, point of order—Grant Robertson.

Grant Robertson: Point of order—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! This is—[Interruption] Order! I do not want to keep reminding members on my right that this is a point of order.

Grant Robertson: Mr Speaker, in both of the first two questions, when the Prime Minister moved outside matters that were his responsibility or, indeed, his answer to the question, you drew that to his attention. I just wondered how long he goes on defying your instructions as Speaker without being pulled into line by you.

Hon Simon Bridges: Speaking to the point of order—

Mr SPEAKER: I do not need any assistance, but I do thank the member for offering it. I will watch that very, very carefully, but when I consider the tone and length of the question, and look at Standing Order 380, it did give some licence to the Prime Minister when he took the opportunity of addressing the question.

Chris Hipkins: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. In his answer, the Prime Minister said he had no ministerial responsibility. The question that the Leader of the Opposition asked him was whether he knew of any person—in other words, is he aware of something. How a Minister becomes aware of something does not matter. In what capacity they become aware, if they have any form of ministerial responsibility for it—and in this case, the Prime Minister is responsible for the statements he has made as Prime Minister. How he became aware of a piece of information is neither here nor there. Ministers, when they are aware of something, are aware of it in their ministerial capacity.

Mr SPEAKER: I have two problems with the point the member is raising. First of all, it is just that the length and tone of the question was substantial. It was very difficult for me to actually decipher the essence of the question the member was asking. Then, I do point out to the member Speakers’ rulings 198/5 and 198/6. The Prime Minister—my job is to judge whether he has addressed some of that question, and in my opinion he has. I do not accept any responsibility for the quality of the answer that has been given.

Andrew Little: Why did he sit for a year on an issue that was so bad it forced the honourable member for Clutha-Southland to retire from politics once it became public and is now the subject of a new police investigation, and is that the moral standard by which he now governs?

Mr SPEAKER: There are two supplementary questions there. The Prime Minister can address either.

Rt Hon BILL ENGLISH: The member is simply wrong. I took part in the previous police investigation over a year ago. How long did that member know about the 85 free foreign workers—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! It is not the Prime Minister’s right to ask me when I knew any such issue.

Food Safety—Food Control Plan Compliance Costs

DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): My question is to the Minister for Food—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Right, I now need to start issuing some final warnings. I will not on this occasion, because the member knows exactly whom I am talking to.

4. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Minister for Food Safety: What is the cost to restaurants of a bespoke custom Food Control Plan for a burger in time and money?

Hon DAVID BENNETT (Minister for Food Safety): Like many people, I like a burger, and assuming the restaurant already has a general food plan, if it were to add a rare burger to its plan, it is likely to take 1 to 4 hours of chefs’ time and 1 to 2 hours of independent checking—approximately $300 to $500 for that checking. The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) also has a responsibility to protect public food safety, and in this case it is in the process of developing a specialist procedure for rare meat burgers to be included in a template food plan. This is something that restaurants can use without the need for the independent evaluation process.

David Seymour: Has the Minister’s enjoyment of burgers extended to burgers prepared using the sous-vide method, and does he agree with his own officials, who recommend this method, or does he agree with Duke of Marlborough Hotel owner Dan Fraser, who asks who the Frank-N-Furter would want a sous-vide burger?

Mr SPEAKER: There are, I think, three supplementary questions; the Minister can address one or three of them.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: No.

David Seymour: Then does he agree with MPI food and beverage manager Sally Johnston, who says: “People have died from under cooked burgers, there is a genuine food safety risk here, we’re not doing this to take the fun out of food.”; if so, how many deaths have been attributed to medium-rare burgers in New Zealand?

Mr SPEAKER: The Hon David Bennett can address either of those two supplementary questions.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: It has been a generation since the last food safety regime was considered, and so there have been some teething issues, but MPI tries to balance the need for public safety with the requirements for producers, and so I have instructed MPI, in this case, to find a flexible and responsible way to achieve this balance.

David Seymour: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I was asking for a very simple piece of information: how many people have died—

Mr SPEAKER: No—[Interruption] Order! No. The member has been here a while now. He knows better than that. He asked two supplementary questions; the Minister can address one of them, and he did.

David Seymour: Then, if 19 reported cases of E. coli from this 2015 report from his department are due to undercooked meat, 103 are due to contact with household pets, and 53 are due to contact with children wearing nappies, what will his department be doing about those other, much greater sources of the same disease?

Hon DAVID BENNETT: Those issues are not relevant to my ministerial portfolios. In this case, we have directed MPI to look at that balance, and it is working towards that to achieve that with the restaurant in this case.

David Seymour: Could this whole sad bureaucratic overreach not be resolved by him directing his officials to rule that it would be much simpler if New Zealand restaurants could simply issue a written advisory requirement, as is found in places like New York and the rest of the world, so that New Zealanders can make up their own mind what they eat, instead of his bureaucrats and officials?

Hon DAVID BENNETT: In this case, the verifier could have communicated the options better to the restaurant involved, but MPI has a role now to find a flexible approach in this case, and I look forward to trying one of those burgers and a beer in the future.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I seek leave to table a letter written to the most senior of those two Ministers, dated 27 June, about the food safety bureaucracy getting out of control, demonstrating what a real MP does, rather than just showboating—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! The last part is irrelevant to me putting the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular letter. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is.

Bovine Blood Products—Market Access

5. STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura) to the Minister for Primary Industries: What recent announcements has the Government made regarding market access for bovine blood products?

Hon NATHAN GUY (Minister for Primary Industries): Last week I was at the Proliant plant at Feilding to announce that access has been approved for 16 New Zealand premises to export bovine blood products into China. Formal access for these products opens up enormous opportunities for our red meat producers, and it is estimated to be worth $50 million to $100 million a year. It is very welcome news for our red meat processors and comes off the back of recent access that we have gained for chilled meat products into China. Hopefully, we will see the first consignment heading to market this week.

Stuart Smith: What are our bovine blood products used for?

Hon NATHAN GUY: A good question. In factories such as Proliant, blood is processed down into serum and protein products. These products are used in the pharmaceutical industry for manufacturing vaccines and a range of other specialist products. We have a relatively free disease status here in New Zealand compared with other countries, which means our blood products are widely sought after by a range of markets across the globe. This is a fantastic example of this Government helping industry take products out of commodities into value add.

Economic Programme—Homelessness and Access to Services

6. GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) to the Minister of Finance: Is the New Zealand economy delivering for all New Zealanders, in particular the 41,000 who are homeless, the 533,000 who could not afford to go to the doctor last year, or the 90,000 young people not in employment, education, or training?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): I do have to note the member for misrepresenting his statistics. There are around 1,400 people who do not have a place to live; 2.1 million New Zealanders have access to free or low-cost GP visits; and the unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds is actually 4.7 percent of the total age group, which is lower than the general population rate of 4.9 percent. Yes, New Zealand’s economy is delivering around 10,000 new jobs each month, real wages are increasing, and this Government will further boost incomes with the Family Incomes Package, which delivers around $45 more per week to two parents on the minimum wage, before adjustments for the accommodation supplement—and, of course, the member’s party voted against it.

Grant Robertson: Can he confirm that the number of 41,000 homeless in the primary question comes from the census produced by Statistics New Zealand and is, in fact, the Government’s definition of “homeless”?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: No. In fact, the member should go back and look at the data, because the data refers to 41,200 people who are living in a range of situations, including temporarily resident with friends or family, in boarding houses, motels, emergency housing, or women’s refuges. The amount of people estimated to be living rough or in improvised dwellings is 1,413. The member needs to get his figures accurate.

Grant Robertson: What exactly is his Government delivering to Maariri Pakuria, who is homeless and pregnant, and has been told that she cannot have an appointment about a social housing place until after her due date?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I would encourage the member to take that case up fully with the Minister for Social Housing. The Government is investing very significantly in emergency housing through this Budget. We have committed $354 million now for transitional places, providing housing for around 4,000 families a year in need of warm and safe housing. That is the first time that transitional housing has received ongoing funding from the New Zealand Government. We are also increasing the number of social houses and investing in affordable houses around the country. Again, I would encourage that member to take up that person’s case with the Minister for Social Housing.

Grant Robertson: What exactly is his Government delivering to the children staying in an Auckland caravan park, who have moved four or five times this year and have not spent more than a few weeks at any one school because their family cannot find anywhere permanent to live?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Again, I would encourage the member to take that up with the Minister for Social Housing—that family’s case and their details.

Grant Robertson: You’re the Government. What are you doing?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, I told the member in the last answer that the Government has committed $354 million for emergency housing places for around 4,000 families a year—[Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! I apologise to the Minister, but there is little point in trying to yell above that interjection level.

Grant Robertson: Why, after 9 years in Government, is he trying to claim that he is delivering to all New Zealanders when there are thousands of New Zealanders who are homeless, thousands of children who are not staying in school regularly, and thousands of New Zealand young people who cannot access mental health services? How is that delivering for all New Zealanders?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: The Budget is delivering for those New Zealanders by increasing the investment in mental health services—something like $244 million. This Government is doing work in social investment to give young New Zealanders who are vulnerable a better start in life by getting them into school. This Government is assisting unemployed people by getting them into work and, mostly, providing the jobs—the 10,000 jobs a month that this economy is producing. That is a range of things that this Government is doing through Budget 2017, which shows, and the public know, that this Government is delivering for all New Zealanders.

Budget 2017—Youth Crime Reduction

7. KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) to the Associate Minister of Justice: What announcements have been made as part of Budget 2017 about the Government’s investment to reduce youth crime?

Hon MARK MITCHELL (Associate Minister of Justice): Budget 2017’s $2 billion law and order package includes $46.9 million over the next 4 years to help prevent youth offending and burglaries. This will include a range of measures from employment support and family therapy through to counselling for offenders to address violence or antisocial thoughts. Our clear focus and priority is public safety combined with initiatives to tackle the root causes of crime. Everyone should be safe in their homes and businesses, and we are focusing on what works to ensure that this is the case.

Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: What other ways will Budget 2017 help keep Kiwis safe?

Hon MARK MITCHELL: Budget 2017’s $2 billion law and order package includes $46.9 million—sorry, Mr Speaker, I have got the wrong piece of paper. Budget 2017 includes a $14.1 million boost to support victims against repeat targeting, by installing additional security features such as window locks or security lights. We are also investing $3.2 million in more youth mentoring because it is clear that many troubled young people lack good role models to guide them in their formative years. Young burglars are most likely to go on to live a life of more serious crime, so addressing their problems early means our homes and businesses will be safer now and in the longer term.

Darroch Ball: How can he think including 17-year-olds in the youth justice system will reduce youth crime when that very system has delivered a 40 percent increase in youth robberies, a 15 percent increase in youth burglaries over a year, a concurrent decrease of convictions in court for that age group, and a 60 percent reoffending rate by young offenders with almost half reoffending three or more times, or does he want 17-year-olds to be exposed to that utter failure too?

Hon MARK MITCHELL: It is proven that putting 17-year-olds into the adult system for low-level crime will not assist them or prevent them from going on to serious crimes. If 17-year-olds do commit a serious crime—e.g., an aggravated robbery—then they will be dealt with in the adult court.

Clayton Mitchell: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Minister sounds like he was quoting some official figures, or a report that he was referring to. Could we ask the Minister—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! That is very easily checked. Was the Minister using an official document when he answered that question?

Hon MARK MITCHELL: No, Mr Speaker.

Darroch Ball: I seek leave to table a number of documents compiled by the library that show that there has been an increase in serious crimes committed by 15- to 19-year-olds and a concurrent decrease in convictions in court for that same age group over that same—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! Leave is sought to table that series of documents that have been prepared by the Parliamentary Library. Is there any objection to them being tabled? There is not; they can be tabled.

Documents, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Freshwater Management—Bottled Water Exports

8. METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) to the Minister for the Environment: Tū ai a ia i runga i te mana o tana korero: “There is a real fairness problem with charging bottled water for export”?

[Does he stand by his statement that “There is a real fairness problem with charging bottled water for export”?]

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment): I stand by my full quote, and that was: “There is a real fairness problem with charging bottled water for export in isolation from other users”.

Metiria Turei: If that is the case, is the Minister intending to extend subsidies to water bottlers, like his Government subsidises irrigation in this country?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: This Government is investing in water infrastructure, such as irrigation schemes, in many instances where there are substantive dividends for water quality, and by increasing minimum flows in rivers, including an example in my own area. I am surprised the Green Party is opposed to those.

Metiria Turei: Does he not think the real unfairness is that NZ Pure Blue could take nearly $23 million worth of water from Blue Spring, near Pūtāruru, every day and yet pay only $6,900 a day for the privilege?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The total amount of export bottled water is about 9 million litres per year. Total water takes are 10 trillion litres a year. The Government’s point is that if you are going to have a sensible discussion about pricing and allocation, you include all water users and do not separate out bottled water for special treatment.

Richard Prosser: Will he immediately adopt New Zealand First’s unique policy, announced 15 months ago, of the only charge to be applied volumetrically to consented water takes being in the form of a royalty only, on any and all exports only, of water as water only, or do we have to wait another 88 days?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The problem I have with New Zealand First policy is that every time I look, it is a different policy. At the last election, New Zealand First’s policy was that nobody would be charged for water. How it has suddenly changed since then—I just think it is part of the nimble-footed approach that New Zealand First’s policy is whatever the last poll said.

Richard Prosser: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Quite apart from being wrong, the Minister has no responsibility for New Zealand First policy.

Mr SPEAKER: The difficulty is that on this occasion, when Mr Prosser asked his question, he asked specifically whether the Government would adopt New Zealand First policy, which gave every chance for the Minister to then answer it.

Metiria Turei: Will the Minister guarantee that NZ Pure Blue will pay a fair rate of royalties, like it would if it was extracting or selling off oil, gas, coal, or any other natural resource?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Each resource needs to be carefully managed and considered. The key difference, of course, with fresh water is that there is 500 trillion litres of new water that comes into New Zealand’s system each year. Last year the Government set up a technical advisory group on both the allocation and pricing of water. The issue of bottled water exports is one of the specific issues on which the Government has asked for advice on how it might proceed with reform.

Metiria Turei: Is it not the case that his Government’s oil and gas export strategy is failing, with revenue declining, and so now it is moving on to try to flog off our most precious natural resource—water—but without a fair return to New Zealanders?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I am so confused about the Green Party’s position on oil and gas. Half the time it complains about the amount of revenue it generates for New Zealand, and now it is complaining that the industry is going backwards. I just think it is typical of the Greens—all over the paddock.

Metiria Turei: Does the Minister genuinely believe it is fair that a company will pay less than $7,000 a day for a public water resource that has a retail price of $23 million a day once it is bottled? Does he think that is fair to New Zealanders?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I dispute the member’s numbers. Statistics New Zealand says that, in total, last year 9 million litres of water was exported. That compares with a total extraction from New Zealand of 10 trillion litres for water users, more than 1 million times as much. What the Government is simply arguing is that if we are going to have a sensible discussion about water pricing and allocation, you need to consider water users over and above those who are for bottled water.

Housing Affordability—First-home Buyers and Foreign Ownership of New Zealand Properties

9. PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister for Building and Construction: Does he think the number of sales to first-home buyers in Auckland falling to the lowest level in 12 years is a “problem of success”?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): No. The proportion of first-home buyers, both in Auckland and nationally, has been increasing since this Government’s KiwiSaver HomeStart scheme was announced in 2014. I also note that the proportion of home sales to first-home buyers, according to CoreLogic, is currently 21 percent nationally. That is actually better than when we became the Government in 2008.

Phil Twyford: Does he agree with Quotable Value that lending restrictions have meant “Cash buyers purchasing property in New Zealand from overseas often have the advantage over New Zealanders”; if so, why is he content for New Zealand first-home buyers to be at the back of the queue?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Quite the opposite. It is this Government that has introduced the most generous scheme for first-home buyers, where we have seen, through KiwiSaver HomeStart, the amount of support grow from $200 million a year to, this last year, $600 million, and the HomeStart grants increase by treble, to over 15,000 young New Zealanders helped into their first home under the most generous scheme that has been offered in a generation.

Phil Twyford: Supplementary question.

Mr SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Metiria Turei. Oh, sorry—Phil Twyford. Supplementary—Phil Twyford.

Phil Twyford: We all look the same, Mr Speaker. Does he think it is reasonable, after 9 years of his Government being in office, to expect first-home buyers to take out a $500,000 mortgage just to buy an entry-level home in Auckland today?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: That is why this Government is working so hard to grow housing supply and why I am so dumbfounded that today the members opposite are going to oppose new housing in Point England, why they oppose housing in Hobsonville, why they have opposed houses in Māngere, and why they have opposed houses in Three Kings. I just do not get how he has got the audacity then to complain that there are not enough houses being built.

Phil Twyford: Does he agree with Andrea Rush of Quotable Value, who says: “because the Government does not accurately measure the number of residential sales to foreign buyers there was no way of knowing what share of sales were going to those offshore.”, and why, after all these years, is the Government still not gathering accurate data on foreign buyers?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: With the legislative changes that this Government made last year, we have better information on the number of houses that are being purchased by those that are tax resident offshore. The problem for Mr Twyford, after his Chinese-sounding name debacle, is that the numbers are so small and his embarrassment is so great that he now wants to invent some other set of numbers to try to justify his Chinese-sounding name debacle. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Phil Twyford: So, in light of that answer, if the Government’s data on foreign buyers is so good, why does Quotable Value say that it is not gathering accurate data on foreign buyers?

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: We have absolutely accurate data on the number, right down to the very last number of the number of tax resident overseas buyers. The number is so intifely small that it is even less then the number of foreign-paid slave workers that the Labour Party has recruited—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! No; I do not think we need to go there. [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Grant Robertson will stand, withdraw, and apologise for that interjection.

Grant Robertson: I am not prepared to withdraw and apologise. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order!

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. In the Minister’s answer, he described something as being “intifely” small. Now, that is not a word I understand, and he is maybe swearing; I want to get it cleared up.

Mr SPEAKER: And that is not a point of order.

Health, Ministry—Pacific Health Scholarships

10. Dr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei) to the Associate Minister of Health: What announcements has she made regarding the Pacific Health Scholarships?

Hon NICKY WAGNER (Associate Minister of Health): This year a record 190 Pacific Health Scholarships are being awarded. It is a total of $1.4 million. The scholarships, which cover 80 percent of course fees, are awarded to outstanding students based on academic achievement, leadership qualities, community involvement, and commitment to Pasifika communities.

Dr Shane Reti: How do these scholarships strengthen the Pacific health and disability workforce?

Hon NICKY WAGNER: The Ministry of Health - funded scholarships aim to strengthen the Pacific health and disability workforce by providing financial assistance to Pacific students who are committed to improving the health of their communities. Boosting the Pacific health workforce will help address the diverse needs of Pacific communities and promote better health outcomes. Many of the students receiving scholarships may not have been able to achieve their employment goals without this kind of support, and I congratulate each and every student and wish them the best for their future studies. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order!

Māori Language / Te Reo—Learning in Schools, Teacher Workforce Capacity Development

11. MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green) to the Minister of Education: Tū ai a ia i runga i te mana o tana kōrero, “we have some real issues in terms of the workforce around te reo”, ā, he mea tērā “looking at” e ia, nā, ka whakaūngia e Te Minita te tukunga o tētahi mahere e mea ana, ka pēhea tā Te Kāwanatanga whakawhanake i te raukaha o te opemahi ki te whakaako i Te Reo Māori ki roto i ngā kura?

[Does she stand by her statement that “we have some real issues in terms of the workforce around te reo” and that it was something she would be “looking at”; if so, will she commit to releasing a plan on how the Government will develop workforce capacity for teaching Te Reo Māori in schools?]

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Children) on behalf of the Minister of Education: Yes. The Minister is looking at the workforce issues around Te Reo Māori teaching and learning, and she is open to discussions about continuing to improve access to high-quality Māori language programmes for students. There is a lot of work under way to support the teaching and learning of Te Reo in schools, and the number of students learning Te Reo is growing. Overall in 2016 nearly 180,000 students were learning Te Reo, an increase of just over 30,000 students since 2010. We expect this number to grow as more schools come together to form communities of learning, and sharing the expertise of their teachers.

Marama Davidson: Kei te whakaae ia, ko tētehi o ngā ara tino pai kia tutukihia te whakarauoratanga me te mahi whāngahia Te Reo Māori i Aotearoa, kia whakaako i Te Reo ki ngā tamariki katoa i roto i ngā kura?

[Does she agree that one of the best ways to ensure that the Māori language recovers and the work involved in feeding it to New Zealand grows is by teaching the language to all children in schools?]

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I am sorry, but my headpiece was not working.

Mr SPEAKER: Can the member then access another headpiece and I will ask for the question to be repeated.

Marama Davidson: Kei te whakaae ia, ko tētehi o ngā ara tino pai kia tutukihia te whakarauoratanga me te mahi whāngahia Te Reo Māori i Aotearoa, kia whakaako i Te Reo ki ngā tamariki katoa i roto i ngā kura?

[Does she agree that one of the best ways to ensure that the Māori language recovers and the work involved in feeding it to New Zealand grows is by teaching the language to all children in schools?]

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Yes, and the Minister has acknowledged that a second language is of huge value to students.

Marama Davidson: Kei te whakaae Te Minita, te maha hoki o ngā hua mō te ako i tētahi reo tuarua mō ā tātau tamariki katoa, ā, he nui ake ngā hua mō te tauira Māori i tana ako i tōna ake Reo me ōna tini tikanga ātaahua, ki te whakaae a ia, ka tautoko mai ki tā mātau, arā, ko Te Reo Māori hei kaupapa matua i ngā kura katoa o Aotearoa nei?

[Does the Minister agree that there are many benefits for all our children to learn a second language, and that it is much more beneficial for Māori students to learn their own language, with its innumerable beautiful customs; and if she agrees, will she support what we advocate—in other words, the Māori language should be the primary agenda for all schools in New Zealand here?]

Mr SPEAKER: The Hon Anne Tolley can address either one or both of those supplementary questions.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The Minister’s comments are that, yes, strong cases have been made for making Te Reo compulsory. In practical terms, there are simply not enough teachers of Te Reo as it is, and that is why the focus has been on encouraging more Māori to become teachers through initiatives like the Kupe scholarships.

Marama Davidson: Kei te whakaaro tonu Te Minita, mā te pūtea taratahi noa ki a Teach First NZ e ora ai tō tātau nei Reo Māori, ahakoa, ēhara kei a rātau te mātauranga, ngā pūkenga ki te whakarahi ake i te hunga e mōhio pai ki te whakaako i Te Reo Māori?

[Does the Minister really consider that a one-off funding into Teach First NZ will give our Māori language life, despite the fact they do not have the knowledge and skills to increase the numbers who really know how to teach the Māori Language?]

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Actually, in 2013 this Government committed more than $11 million to Te Reo Māori scholarships and awards. There are currently 350 places. Budget 2017 provided an extra $7.6 million for Māori language curriculum resources, in addition to the $2 million that is already spent each year. As I said in my primary answer, the number of students learning Te Reo is growing, the number of Māori immersion schools is growing, and this Government believes that access to that second language is increasingly being taken up by students throughout New Zealand.

Marama Davidson: Ka whakaūngia e ia tētahi mahere ki te whakawhanake me pēhea te hanga a Te Kāwanatanga i te raukaha ki roto i ō tātau kura ki te whakaako i Te Reo Māori ki ngā tauira katoa i Aotearoa?

[Would she commit to developing a plan for how the Government will build capacity in our schools to teach the Māori language to all our students in New Zealand?]

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The difficulty with committing to a plan is that one of the main difficulties is retention of teachers whom we have trained. So, prior to actually putting more resources into training teachers, the Minister is carrying out a pilot scheme to try to understand why we are losing trained Te Reo teachers from the system and how we can better support those who have been trained to teach Te Reo as they come into the education system and retain them in the education system so that we can grow the number of Te Reo teachers.

Police—Services, Delivery

12. STUART NASH (Labour—Napier) to the Minister of Police: Does she believe her Government has to accept any responsibility for the fact that almost 60 percent of Police staff do not believe New Zealand Police delivers on the promises it makes to the public; if not, why not?

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister of Police): No. This Government does, however, accept responsibility for putting 1,125 more staff on the ground over the next 4 years so that they can raise the level of service provided to the people of New Zealand.

Stuart Nash: In light of that answer, is it true that the first business case taken to Cabinet by Judith Collins, the hard-working former Minister of Police, asked for 1,165 sworn officers because this is what police said they needed to “reduce serious crime by 10 percent,” rather than the 880 officers delivered by her Government?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: There have been a number of business cases. Cabinet has made its decision, and I stand by it.

Stuart Nash: Does she think her Government’s constant threat of cuts to road policing might have anything to do with the fact that road policing staff scored the lowest across every key measure in the 2017 workplace survey?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: No, and in fact the first part of the member’s question was absolutely incorrect. It is very much thanks to the Minister of Transport and the ministry itself, which had an extra $10 million, and none of those people were made redundant.

Stuart Nash: What does she say to the 57 percent of hard-working police officers who say that the New Zealand Police does not provide adequate training for the work that they do?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: I say that more police on the ground, and those extra 245 other police, will free them up to get to do more of that training, and it is coming their way.

Stuart Nash: Why, 9 long years after National made so many promises around addressing the issues of crime, is meth out of control in our communities, only 28 percent of police say they are engaged in their jobs, and 55 percent of police say that they have an unacceptable level of workplace stress?

Hon PAULA BENNETT: That, in fact, is not true, because what we do see is the Citizens’ Satisfaction Survey, which shows that 84 percent of the public is satisfied with police, that 87 percent have said that their expectations were met or exceeded, and that 78 percent of the public said that they have trust and confidence in our wonderful police. I will not be talking them down, even though the member might.

Stuart Nash: I would like to table the 2017 Police Workplace Survey, which shows 28 percent of police say they are engaged in their jobs and 58 percent of police say—

Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] We do not need a further description. I presume it has not been publicly circulated to members.

Hon PAULA BENNETT: It is a public document.

Mr SPEAKER: Order! If it is a public document, I do not intend to put the leave.

Bills

Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill

First Reading

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): I move, That the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be now read a first time.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be now read a first time.

Ayes 62

New Zealand National 58; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Noes 57

New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be now read a second time.

Ayes 62

New Zealand National 58; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Noes 57

New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.

Bills read a second time.

Bill read a first time.

Supplementary Estimates

Imprest Supply Debate

Imprest Supply Debate

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Finance): I move, That the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be now read a second time. The Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill seeks the House’s agreement to changes to existing appropriations and to new appropriations proposed since the Estimates of 2016-17 were finalised. The supplementary estimates also show proposed changes to capital injections to departments and offices of Parliament.

The Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill provides authority for Government expenditure from 1 July 2017 until the Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill is passed. Under the Standing Orders a 3-month period is allowed between the introduction and passing of the Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill. Imprest supply is, therefore, likely to be required for up to 2 months after the start of this 2017-18 financial year.

Imprest supply provides for the start of the Government’s Budget 2017—the beginnings of the first year, the 2017-18 financial year. That Budget is all about delivering for New Zealanders. This Government has gone forward. It has used the opportunity of a strong economy that is delivering rising surpluses for New Zealand to make some significant investments in the New Zealand economy and in public services. In fact, the Government is increasing its investment in public services, it is increasing its investment in public infrastructure, and it is increasing its investment in families, through the Family Incomes Package.

The public services investment is very, very significant indeed—$7 billion over 4 years, with a real focus on meeting the demands of a growing country. For example, in education, there is $1.1 billion over 4 years to increase operational grants funding to provide for roll growth in schools and roll growth in our early childhood centres. The Budget also includes the justice sector—$1.2 billion for 10 percent more police staff, of course for burglary prevention, reducing youth offending, and supporting at-risk prisoners, plus the flow-on effects to the justice sector, the courts, and rehabilitation.

An important part of the appropriations is the Ministry for Vulnerable Children. It is a very significant investment, to improve the lives of our most vulnerable young children. There is the social housing investment, which has been discussed earlier in the House today, with the Government making a big investment in the emergency housing sector in particular, but also in social housing more generally. And, of course, the big one in terms of public services is the very large investment in the health sector—in fact, $3.9 billion over the next 4 years. It includes big investments in the district health boards, for their services; in Disability Support Services; in new pharmaceuticals, with Pharmac; the ambulance services—the double-crewing is a very good and positive initiative; and, of course, the bowel-screening programme roll-out as well, which is a strong initiative of this Government, for the prevention of bowel cancer.

The amount of $3.9 billion over 4 years is the biggest health investment in around 11 years, and takes the total investment in health from when we first arrived in office, at something around $11 billion, to nearly $16.8 billion now. There are some in this House who characterise that as being somehow a reduction. I think that is quite a stretch. It is definitely an increase, no matter which way you cut it.

The other part of the public services investment is our social investment work. That is a significant sum of money to improve the lives of New Zealand’s most vulnerable citizens. There is $321 million in new initiatives, over the next 4 years, in the social investment space, including initiatives to help our young kids have a better start in life, to reduce reoffending of criminals, to reduce barriers to employment and independence, and, most importantly, a very significant investment in mental health services. There is $116 million in new social investment initiatives for new approaches to the challenges of mental health needs. Actually, across the Government we are investing $224 million in new spend on mental health services, which is a significant additional investment. So no matter which way you talk about it, this Government’s investment is very significant.

Grant Robertson: He’s reading out the PowerPoint. Why don’t you just table the PowerPoint?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Well, the member is raising why I do not just table the speech, and the reason for that is that he has not listened to the Budget yet. He has not read the Budget. [Interruption]

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: He has not actually looked at the Budget and that is why his talking points are so removed from reality.

The Government’s infrastructure investment is also very significant. There is $4 billion in additional new spending in this Budget, but the total capital investment in this Budget is $32.5 billion over the next 4 years in capital expenditure—$32.5 billion, which is 40 percent more than the last 4 years—

Jami-Lee Ross: How much?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE: It is 40 percent more than the last 4 years—40 percent more—and double what it was a decade ago. That is why this Government is called New Zealand’s infrastructure Government, because of the massive investment we are making in New Zealand’s infrastructure.

Then there is the Family Incomes Package. This is probably really important for the Labour Party members to listen to because they have not heard the public on this one yet and there is still time to change their minds. This is the $2 billion a year Family Incomes Package, which is delivering for low and middle income families very big increases in their incomes. Firstly, we have the tax threshold adjustments, which will apply from 1 April next year, then we have the Working for Families adjustments, which will see parents with young children get between $9 a week for the first child and $18 to $27 a week for subsequent children.

Then there are the big increases to the accommodation supplement, including not just increasing the maximum payable within areas but seeing significant areas of the country moving up the geographical area ratings so they get even more again. This package is very significant. It delivers 1.34 million New Zealand families an average of $26 a week. Most of the House has voted in favour of it but, actually, there were still the Labour Party members who somehow managed to find a way, in their tortured logic, to vote against the Family Incomes Package.

Of course the Family Incomes Package also flows on to superannuitants. Superannuitants next year on 1 April will get an additional $13 a week per couple, above and beyond what they would have got anyway as a result of the linkage between after-tax wages and superannuitant incomes. That is due to happen on 1 April next year. We have the public services investment, we have the infrastructure investment, and we have the Family Incomes Package, which are all enabled by this Budget and by this first imprest supply bill.

But, of course, none of it would be possible without a strong economic plan that is delivering strong growth in the New Zealand economy. I have spoken around the country over the last 4 weeks, spoken to something like 32, 33 different groups, including business groups as far afield as in the Bay of Islands, as in parts of the Wairarapa, as in down south as well, and all of those groups are saying the New Zealand economy is doing well and they want to see it continue to do well. They all say to me the most important thing is for this Government to continue past 23 September so we can deliver more growth, more jobs, and also more income so that the Government can actually deliver more public services, more infrastructure, and more for family incomes.

So I invite the Opposition members to, once again, stand up and oppose this Budget today and I hope they keep opposing it. I hope they keep opposing the Family Incomes Package all the way to 23 September. That would be the best thing that could happen for this Government and the best thing that could happen for this country, because this Government would then be re-elected to be able to keep growing the economy and keep providing for the public of New Zealand. Thank you.

GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand that I am required to withdraw and apologise, so I withdraw and apologise.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

GRANT ROBERTSON: Here is a Minister of Finance who had the opportunity to present a Budget to New Zealand that would finally do what for 9 years his Government had failed to do—finally invest properly in health and in housing and in education and in lifting children out of poverty. And what did that Minister do? He squandered that opportunity. He squandered that opportunity because he saw the dangled carrot of tax cuts, and the campaign manager for the National Party, who happens to be the Minister of Finance, could not resist it. He had to grab hold of that tax cut. He asked me in his speech why the Labour Party members had opposed the Government’s Budget. Well, we do not think the priority for New Zealand today is to give a Cabinet Minister like Steven Joyce or a member of Parliament like me a thousand bucks a year. That is not the priority. If that is the National Party’s priority, if that is Jonathan Coleman’s priority, then that is great.

Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: This old chestnut.

GRANT ROBERTSON: That is fantastic, Mr Coleman, because everywhere I go around New Zealand, when they say to me “But why are our health services being cut? Why are we paying more money to go to the doctor?”, I say: “That is because Jonathan Coleman, the Minister of Health, wants a tax cut of a thousand bucks for him. That’s why you are not getting the health services in your community.” That is why, when we go to Dunedin and they say “Where’s the hospital that Jonathan Coleman promised us?”, it is not there. When we go to Canterbury and Christchurch, where I was yesterday, parents are coming up to us and saying: “My daughter cannot get mental health service treatment in this city.” Someone who at their first appointment was diagnosed as having issues that needed to be dealt with had to wait 4 months for their second appointment.

So, Mr Coleman—Jonathan Coleman—says “A thousand dollar tax cut for me.”, but that young woman in Christchurch, she does not get to have a second appointment. How is that right, Minister? How is that morally right? How is that fiscally right? Come on, Minister—because Jonathan Coleman and the rest of that National Government have their priorities completely wrong in this Budget.

Jonathan Coleman knows this, too, because $200 million is the number that Jonathan Coleman should remember. That is the gap between what his own Ministry of Health told him was needed to stand still—not improve services; just stand still—and Jonathan Coleman failed to deliver that. There was $680 million needed to stand still, $480 million delivered—a $200 million gap, adding up to the $2.3 billion worth of health cuts that Jonathan Coleman has been responsible for.

I was on an aeroplane recently, next to someone—a plumber from Dunedin. He said to me, about the tax cuts, that he did not want them, because he had thought about that. If he added up the $26 a week that everyone in his street would get—added all of that up—that would be one more nurse for the hospital, one more community police officer for his community. He said: “That’s what I want. That’s what I want in my community.” And that is what New Zealanders do want.

This Government is all about the sugar hits, and not about the solutions, when it comes to this Budget. By all means, put in front of the public a tax cut. People say: “That’s great. I’m interested in that. I like the idea of that.” But New Zealanders think about that and they care about their neighbours and their families and their communities, and they want to see the investment that has been so sadly lacking from this Government. Once again we have a Budget from National that completely fails to start to fix the housing crisis. Budget after Budget we have stood up in this House and said: “Where is the National Party when it comes to housing?”. Well, this Budget delivered the grand total of land for 1,200 homes. We are talking about a housing shortage in Auckland alone of 30,000 or 40,000 houses, and the best that the National Government can come up with in this Budget is land for 1,200 homes. It is completely inadequate and it is part of the squandered opportunity that National had in this Budget.

Then when we look at the fact that we are actually debating the appropriations from 2016 and the supplementary estimates—but the Minister gave a very wide-ranging speech to which I am responding—when we look in them, we actually see that 17 out of 20 of the district health boards (DHBs) actually had deficits that had to be made up for. The Minister of Health has, unfortunately, repeated that problem by mucking up how much money each of those DHBs had to get, and now they have had to give some of those back. That again means service cuts in our health sector.

Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: No, Grant. Come on!

GRANT ROBERTSON: Yes, it does. The Minister is in such denial about this, but he knows he has got a health sector that has lost complete confidence in him, in his chief executive, and now he is in the embarrassing position of having to say to those DHBs, which had already organised what they were going to do with that money, that they have to give some of it back. That is a health system in crisis, as the housing crisis has got away on National, as well.

It is time for a Budget that actually delivers for all New Zealanders. Here is a message for the National members: you are not delivering for all New Zealanders when Statistics New Zealand tells us there are 41,000 people who are homeless; you are not delivering for all New Zealanders when we have the lowest homeownership rate in 60 years; you are not delivering for all New Zealanders when rental prices in Wellington go up by 10 percent, and 15 percent, and then 20 percent a year; you are not delivering for all New Zealanders when we have an education system where early childhood centres are $40,000 worse off a year than they were when National came into office. That is not delivering for all New Zealanders.

National is doing what it always does—delivering for a small section of New Zealanders. What we need is an approach to a Budget that actually sets out, at the beginning, the kind of society that we want to live in. On this side of the House, we want a society where every New Zealander gets to contribute; where everyone gets the basic Kiwi value of a fair go. I think after 9 long years of a National Government, New Zealanders should expect that they would all get a fair go, but they have not got that from this Budget.

We have a National Government that has run out of steam, because this Budget is back to the 1990s playbook, back to the tax cuts to get yourself an election win. It is irresponsible. It completely fails the test that New Zealanders set for their Government: to make sure that every person in our country gets the basics, the fundamental building blocks of opportunity.

That is why the Labour Party has prioritised those: actually making sure that we build houses, affordable homes for first-home buyers; actually making sure that we put the emergency housing and State housing in place. Not sell State housing, but build State housing; thousands of houses to make sure that that thing that is the bedrock of strong communities, stable communities—housing, quality housing, housing that does not make you sick, housing that is your sanctuary. That is why that is a priority for the Labour Party. It is not a priority for this Government, or in this Budget.

It is also why it is a priority to make sure that our health system is funded properly. Now, I hear Jonathan Coleman get up and talk about how we spent a record amount of money in the health system. Well, families who are going to the supermarket tonight will spend a record amount of money on their groceries. It does not mean they get more groceries, Dr Coleman; it means they are paying more—just as you are; just as Jonathan Coleman is. That is the thing: he is not actually funding health for population increase, or funding health for inflation. In real terms, the National Government has taken more than $2 billion—and he knows it—out of the health sector. It is just the same in the education sector.

So on this side of the House, we stand proudly for a fresh approach to these issues in New Zealand; to make sure we build the houses, to make sure that we support the health and education systems, and to give our communities proper community policing. Right around New Zealand, that is what National has taken away, and it has come up with an inadequate package in here. We are going to deliver 1,000 more sworn police in our first term.

I want to finish on this: this Budget lacks any vision for the long-term future of New Zealand. If this Government was serious about that, in this Budget it would have restarted contributions to the Superannuation Fund. But it did not. It chose to prioritise tax cuts. It chose to prioritise its short-term electoral interests over the long-term good of New Zealand. That ends up being the legacy of this Budget: a squandered opportunity to do what is right, a squandered opportunity to rebuild the social foundations of New Zealand. This will be the last Budget of the National Government in this era of politics. Labour will deliver a fair and sustainable Budget next year.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): This is Steven Joyce’s first Budget and, I suspect, the first Budget of many, because what it does is deliver a trifecta of great things for this country: investment in public services, investment in infrastructure, as well as giving some money back to New Zealanders who need it most—those at the bottom of the heap—through tax cuts and through the accommodation supplement. We just heard a tired, trite, and platitudinous speech from the shadow Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson. He says National is going straight back to the 1990s. Well, Grant Robertson’s political apprenticeship in the student unions was in the 1990s, and I think he is obsessed with the 1990s. We often hear this from Grant Robertson: that this fifth National Government is just like the National Government of the 1990s. I think he is obsessed with it.

He just runs the tired old lines that we have heard time and time again—things like: “The Government’s cut early childhood education spending.”, when the reality is that early childhood education funding has doubled under this Government, participation is up—

Sue Moroney: You cut the funding for qualified staff.

CHRIS BISHOP: —achievements are up, and the number of qualified staff is up, Ms Moroney, as well. We hear that there have been health funding cuts. As has been pointed out time and time again in this House, it is a pretty strange definition of “cut” when it is actually a massive increase, just not quite as much as you would like to have—

Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman: A wish list.

CHRIS BISHOP: That is what they describe as a cut. My colleague the Minister of Health points out it is a wish list. The reality is that health spending is massively up, and also health results. Actually, sometimes we do get confused a bit about the quantum of spending—we mistake that for intention and we mistake that for empathy and we mistake it for care. It is actually not always about the amount of money you spend. The spending the Government has done is up on health. It is up on education. It is up on the things that are important to New Zealanders. But, actually, fundamentally, it is not about the magnitude.

Alastair Scott: It’s about results.

CHRIS BISHOP: It is not about the absolute quantum; as Alastair Scott points out, it is about the results. New Zealanders actually want results out of their Government. They want results out of their public services. They are the customers of the Government, and, very often, they are the customers in a monopolistic situation. The Government is the only—or, at least, very nearly the only—provider. So it is really important the Government gets its own house in order and focuses on results. The good news is that health results are up: more elective surgeries, more doctors, and more nurses. Health results are getting better, and it is the same with education.

Then we hear the critique from Grant Robertson in his speech that this is a Budget that lacks the vision for the long term. This is just a classic critique. It is the thing you throw out there when you have run out of other things to say, you know: “It just lacks vision. We need a vision.” The Labour Party is obsessed with visions and plans and aspirations and dreams—things like that. “We need a vision, you know. We just need a vision.”

Well, actually, this is a Budget that laid out a vision of the country, and the contrast between the two parties—as we head into the regulated period and as we head into the election year—is a stark one. What the Budget laid out was a vision where we have a globally connected economy, where foreign migration is welcomed into the country, where foreign investment is welcomed into New Zealand, and where New Zealand makes its way on the world stage as a trading, globally connected country. Actually, the Labour Party and the Green Party, and definitely the New Zealand First Party, stand against that vision. It was a Budget that laid out a vision for the country, and it was a Budget that laid out the vision of returning more money to New Zealanders—more of their own money.

The Labour Party says about tax cuts: “It’s a bribe.” That is its attitude. It really just sums up, I think, exactly how the Labour Party views New Zealanders and the role of the Government. If you say to New Zealanders that through tax threshold changes they can keep a bit more of their own money, as this Budget does—particularly for those at the bottom end of the income spectrum—the Labour Party’s attitude is that it is a bribe. But it is their own money; it is not Government’s money. If they are allowed to keep a bit more of it, it is a bribe. It is very difficult to bribe people with their own money, but that is the Labour Party’s attitude to it. So I reject absolutely that this Budget did not lay out a vision for the country. It laid out a clear vision.

Sue Moroney: How’s the free market going in Auckland, Chris?

CHRIS BISHOP: “How’s the free market going?” says Sue Moroney. Well, the free market is going pretty well, actually. Sue Moroney should look at what free markets have done for the world. Free markets have dragged billions of people out of poverty. Free markets have raised living standards in China and India and numerous countries around the world. Free markets have made a more material contribution to the eradication of global poverty than anything else. Sue Moroney says: “Oh, how’s the free market going?”. What an insightful remark into the attitude, and the stupidity, quite frankly, of the modern-day Labour Party: what have free markets ever done for us! Well, free markets have raised living standards around the world and have halved extreme poverty in the last 15 years. That is what free markets and free trade have done.

Actually, that is a very insightful comment about the Labour Party’s attitude to trade, because what this Budget does is invest in New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. It invests in our foreign affairs and trade department. [Interruption]

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

CHRIS BISHOP: It invests in our trade negotiators—[Interruption]

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Wind it back a bit.

CHRIS BISHOP: —and it invests in all the things that New Zealand needs to do to take advantage of globalisation. Steven Joyce in question time today talked about how New Zealanders are shaping globalisation to their own advantage, and they absolutely are doing that. Whether it is Kaynemaile in Pētone and Lower Hutt, Sanpro Industries across the road, the exporters that Steven Joyce talked about in question time today, or the exporters that the Prime Minister, Bill English, talked about on the weekend, New Zealanders are shaping globalisation to their advantage.

Again—to return to the theme from just before—what this Budget does is set out a vision of New Zealand as a trading nation, and that is how we actually grow jobs for New Zealanders. That is how we grow our exports and create higher incomes.

Sue Moroney: How’s the invisible hand going in Auckland?

CHRIS BISHOP: Sue Moroney’s attitude is: “How’s that free market going?”. Well, what free markets and the trade of goods and services do for New Zealanders is allow more New Zealand companies and more New Zealand individuals to sell more to the world. It allows New Zealanders to hire more New Zealanders. It allows companies to export more, hire more people, and create profits and growth, which ultimately gets returned to New Zealanders.

So Sue Moroney’s attitude is quite instructive, actually. Frankly, it is a wholly depressing view of reality.

Sue Moroney: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is supposed to be a speech on a particular issue. I recognise that he has run out of things to say about it, but misrepresenting my view is not what this speech is about.

CHRIS BISHOP: Speaking to the point of order—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I do not need any assistance. That point of order was completely fatuous. The member has taken that point of order to interrupt the flow of a speech from the member who has the call. She has made numerous interjections all the way through that speech, and she has been asked in certain terms to keep that down a bit, which she has refused to do. The previous speaker from the Labour Party was very wide, and, funnily enough, the Minister, who was accused of travelling way off his speech, was using—as the other side noted—slides relating directly to the Budget, so you cannot have it so many different ways. So I would ask the member not to take fatuous points of order in the future, and I recall Chris Bishop.

CHRIS BISHOP: Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. Just returning to where I left off, which was about what this Budget invests in, this Budget invests in education in New Zealand. It invests money to welcome international students into our economy. It invests in our Immigration Service in order to enforce the rules around immigration, particularly around foreign students in New Zealand. It invests in the Electoral Commission for the safe and fair running of electioneering and election spending, and it invests in our Parliamentary Service to make sure that all political parties follow the rules when it comes to election funding.

Why are these things relevant? Why are these very important investments relevant? It is because what we have heard in the last few days was industrial-strength hypocrisy from the Labour Party over there when we discovered that it was importing foreign workers in order to come and work on its election campaign. It is quite amazing, actually. It calls them “fellows”. When I think of fellowships, I think of people at ivory-tower universities in Cambridge, sort of squirrelling themselves away in the corner, having a glass of whisky as they write learned theses. That is what fellowship means. It does not mean living in substandard accommodation, working 20 hours a day—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: And now the member is—

Dr Megan Woods: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I take offence at a marae being called substandard accommodation.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, speaking—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, I do not need any assistance in respect of that. The member was heading wider. He obviously took my comments to the previous point of order as licence, which he should not do, and he should stick to the Budget. However, I—

Dr Megan Woods: I’ve taken offence.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry, but you cannot—

Dr Megan Woods: I’ve taken offence.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, no, I am sorry, but a member cannot decide they are going to take offence in relation to something like that, which was part of this particular speech. The member could take offence at something that is said in relation to her particularly; she cannot take—

Dr Megan Woods: OK, fair call.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes. And, once again, we see the use of a point of order for a different purpose. Let us stick to the rules.

CHRIS BISHOP: Anyway, just—

Dr Megan Woods: It was offensive.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, I did not say—

Dr Megan Woods: Visit a marae some time, before you start putting them down.

CHRIS BISHOP: Megan Woods, the only person who has mentioned the word “marae” in the last minute is you. It was not me.

Dr Megan Woods: You called it substandard accommodation.

CHRIS BISHOP: I brought it—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Anyway, back to the Budget.

CHRIS BISHOP: Yes, I did mention substandard accommodation, because I was quoting what a Labour Party volunteer had said in the media. I was quoting directly from a person in the media. So the only person who has mentioned marae is Megan Woods.

With 1 minute left in this learned contribution in the House this afternoon, I do want to summarise by saying that, actually, I think Sue Moroney’s contribution to the debate summarises the philosophical differences that you see at the heart of this Budget document—

Sue Moroney: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have not made a contribution in this debate, and I think that the member should stop misleading the House by saying that I have actually taken a call in this debate. I have not.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member will regain her seat. The member has made numerous contributions to this debate. They will all be recorded in Hansard, or those that are heard, and, whether she likes it or not, an interjection is a contribution to the debate. I look forward to her scripted contribution to the debate that she will make when, eventually, she has a call, should she seek one. I would also very much look forward to the member who has the call—and who has, thankfully, 32 seconds to go—addressing the matter that is under debate, which is the appropriation bill.

CHRIS BISHOP: This is a great Budget. It invests in public services for a growing economy, it invests in infrastructure for a growing economy, and it allows the New Zealanders who need it most to keep more of their own money. The Labour Party thinks that is a bribe. The National Party thinks that is what New Zealanders and a growing economy deserve—to keep some more of their own money—and that summarises the differences between the two parties in Parliament today.

STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Well, that was quite an enlightening speech, was it not? Let me take just a couple of points that Mr Bishop mentioned. Mr Bishop said very early on that this Budget—and I quote—“delivers for those at the bottom of the heap”. This is how Mr Bishop thinks of those who are slightly less fortunate than him—they are at the bottom of the heap. You know, you give them a couple of bucks, you give them a good kick in the guts, and, hopefully, they keep quiet. Well, Mr Bishop, what I am seeing in my electorate and what we are hearing around the country is that those at the “bottom of the heap” are actually sick to death of this Government and are looking for a fresh approach to a whole lot of ideas.

Then Mr Bishop said—and I quote—“It is important the Government gets its own house in order.” Well, you would think that after 9 long years, the Government would have its house in order, but it just does not. It just does not have its house in order, and nothing epitomises this more than the Minister of Health, Jonathan Coleman, having a vote of no confidence against his CEO. It is just unacceptable.

Then Mr Bishop said that—dare I say it—“Labour is obsessed with vision and aspiration.” Well, heaven forbid—heaven forbid being obsessed with aspiration. Well, if that is a crime, then I am absolutely guilty, because I got into Parliament because I have really strong aspirations for New Zealand. We have ideas. We know where we want to take New Zealand. If having a vision for New Zealand is a crime, then, yet again, I am guilty, because Labour has a vision, Labour has aspiration, and we have a whole lot of fresh approaches to the issues that this Government has just not dealt with after 9 long years.

Let me take you through some of these. Let me take you through what the Budget said about policing, OK. I know that policing is dear to the Deputy Speaker’s heart because that is his former profession. What this Budget says, and what we do know, is that crime is on the increase. We know this, and we know that resolution rates are, I believe, unacceptably low. So Labour has sought to address this. We have listened to what the police have to say, and what we have said is that we are going to deliver 1,000 more police in our first term. The police said that what they need are 1,165 more police. That is what they said would reduce serious crime. The Minister said they are going to have 880 police, but in the Budget—and this is the surprising thing—in terms of crime resolution, the document says it is not going to increase. The crime resolution rate is going to be 43 percent—this is the aspirational target, dare I say—for crime against the person, and 13 percent for crime against property. That is the same as it has been last year, and the same before, and that is the Government’s target. What this says is 87 percent of crime committed against property is not going to be solved. It is an admission by this Government that it is just not in control of this.

When I look at the other Budget figures—case resolution and support to judicial process—what this is actually talking about is police prosecutions. What we do know is in 2016-17—these are figures from the Budget documents—there were 100,000 cases prosecuted, and yet this Budget is funding only 90,000 cases. What that says is yet again police prosecutors are going to be way underfunded. The courts are going to be clogged. People are going to be in our prisons on remand for a hell of a lot longer. And what does that do for our justice system? Absolutely nothing.

In the Budget it says in 2016-17 there were 170,000 prisoners escorted and/or held in custody, and yet this Budget is funding only 140,000. What is going to happen when more police come on the beat? Resolution rates stay the same, but the Government says we are funding 30,000 fewer prisoners escorted and/or held in custody. It is just not realistic. There is no aspiration here. There is no vision here, and it demands a fresh approach. That is exactly what needs to happen. Last year the number of crimes, the victimisations, increased by 11,568. I know that probably means nothing, but let us put it into a per week figure: 222 more crimes last year than the year before. Yet there is very little funding to solve these crimes.

What we are seeing at the moment is that our communities are really concerned about the lack of policing. They are concerned about a lack of community policing. They are concerned about the police stations in their local area closing down and not being open, and the terrible thing is that in the Budget the capital expenditure dropped by 30 percent, or $12.7 million. What sort of signal does this send? Well, let me tell you. What it means is those kiosks, those 100-odd kiosks that were closed around our communities—they are not opening. The police station that closed—was it Porirua, Mr Faafoi?

Kris Faafoi: Well, we had two.

STUART NASH: Two closed. The two police stations that closed in Porirua—they are not going to be reopening. The more police that are coming on to the beat, supposedly—they are not going to be in our community. They are going to be elsewhere. In fact, the interesting thing is the Budget said last year there were 120,000 hours of foot patrol, and what the Budget says for next year is there are going to be between 120,000 and 140,000 hours. So the bottom target is exactly the same.

The Minister says she has been listening to her communities. She has not, because if the Minister of Police had been listening to her communities, then first and foremost she would put as many police on the beat as the police say they need. They said they needed 1,165 more police to put a dent in serious crime. They have been given 880 police. It is simply not enough. What the police documents showed, themselves—these are the police documents; they are not my figures—was that despite recent seizures of methamphetamine, the increase in supply and the drop in price is rampant. There is more meth and it is cheaper. And you know what? The police cannot do anything about this, because they just have not got the resources. At the moment there are 195—195—police whose primary responsibility is the organised crime squads. In my district, which goes from north of Gisborne to Porangahau—this is my policing district—there are five officers whose sole responsibility it is to go after the gangs that are peddling this death in our communities. And that is when they have not been seconded to other duties. It is simply not enough. It really is not.

Mr Robertson talked about the fact that health funding for population has dropped. We know health funding for education has dropped, and funding for police has also dropped. When the Government took over, there was one officer for every 485 New Zealanders. Now there is one officer for every 526 New Zealanders, and the number of police that this Minister has said the Government is going to provide does not even get us down to a 1:500 ratio. It is simply not good enough that after 9 years of crime increasing, after 9 years of ratios increasing, the Government has finally decided it is going to do something about this. The funding for police numbers has to be an ongoing process. You cannot just grow a whole lot more when crime is rampant, or when meth is out of control, or when the gangs are controlling our communities. It has to be done on an ongoing basis, and I am afraid the Government has failed in this area. There are not enough police to keep our communities safe.

I have been doing street corner meetings around my electorate for a year and a half, and there are two big issues that come up, and it does not matter where in the electorate I go, No. 1 is the lack of police resource. People are really concerned about the lack of police resource and what is happening. No. 2 is actually bottled water, Dr Smith. People are absolutely incredulous, as I am, that in fact we can give our water away for free to someone who then sells it to make a profit. When Dr Smith says “Oh, well, it is only a small fraction of the water we pull out of the ground.”, it does not matter. It is not about supply and demand. It is an economic argument. It is Economics 101—we know that if something has no price it does not have a value. If it does not have a value, there is absolutely no incentive to maximise its worth or optimise opportunities.

For the last 30 seconds I just want to say that the Budget just does not deliver for policing in our communities. There is not enough here. There have been cuts to road funding. There have been cuts to the targets, and we all know that stopping speeding drivers saves lives. I am just very concerned that what we are seeing here is not a Budget that has any aspiration, and not a Budget that has any vision. It needs a fresh approach, and, under Andrew Little, the next Budget will deliver on that. Thank you very much.

ALASTAIR SCOTT (National—Wairarapa): Since the Budget, have we not noticed a change in tone from the Opposition? Have we not noticed an increased despondency, a tone of giving up? Look, this is what we have had, and I tell you what, those members have had enough. After 9 long years in Opposition, they are exhausted—so exhausted that the Leader of the Opposition said he needed a breather. It is such a tough life over there, it is such a responsibility, and they are such a busy crowd that they needed a breather. We are not interested in taking a breather on this side. We are embracing the speed, the strength, the depth of this economy and the people who support it—the families, the communities, and, of course, this Government, supporting those who are contributing to this growing economy.

Aupito William Sio: Say it again: “After 9 long years—”

ALASTAIR SCOTT: After 9 long years in Opposition they lack the innovation and the aspiration. They are not interested in promoting an open economy. In fact, what they want to do is they want to slow things down, because they need, after 9 long years in Opposition, time to catch up.

This is a Government that has no interest in taking a breather. We are interested only in carrying on with new ideas to inspire New Zealanders to continue to grow the economy at a top speed of more than 3 percent—one of the top performing economies in the planet.

Kris Faafoi: What planet?

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Or on the planet—take it the way you like. Those members are in disarray. They cannot be organised enough to bring in 85 international students, to house them properly, to pay them a minimum wage—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: So back to the Budget.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: —that is how disorganised the Opposition is. There are no new ideas on that side. Dr Smith asked the last speaker, Stuart Nash, right at the end, after 9½ minutes, where the policy was. Where is the new policy? Where are the fresh ideas from the Opposition? There are none. But, wait, there were a couple—they have a few. There was the universal benefit idea, not that long ago, of giving everyone, no matter what their income, a benefit of $11,000 per head. What a ridiculously expensive and ill-thought—

Dr Megan Woods: This has nothing to do with the bill in front of you.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: This is the policy of the Labour Party that is opposing this—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member, but it is only going to lead to disorder if the member keeps wandering off the bill that, apparently, there is so much good news about. I would like for him to return to the bill in hand, which is the Budget.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. My point was that we have well-thought-out, well-considered policies that support a growing economy. We have seen the construction boom in this country. Just a few years ago there were only 100,000 people in the construction sector; today we have 250,000 people contributing to building the homes that are required because there are more New Zealanders staying at home. They are choosing—they are voting with their feet—to stay in New Zealand, and that does present challenges that we are embracing. We say this is an opportunity for New Zealanders to contribute to the construction industry, for example. The number of apprentices in New Zealand is at an all-time high. The number of people working in the economy is at an all-time high.

It is not just in Auckland; it is throughout the regions. The electorate of the Wairarapa, which I am very proud to represent, is full of economic activity. The infrastructure that has been invested is being seen on the Rimutaka hill road, all the way through State Highway 2, all the way through to Dannevirke and through to Waipukurau, to the Hawke’s Bay. It is evident that this infrastructure spend, as Minister Joyce said, will be doubling from that which was invested only 10 years ago—more than $34 billion in infrastructure spend. That is a challenge that we are here to embrace and here to take opportunity from.

There is a lot of good stuff in this Budget.

Fletcher Tabuteau: He just can’t remember it.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: The Opposition says there is nothing in it. This Budget promotes stuff that those members do not like—that is, stuff that supports free-trade agreements, that encourages immigrants to come into the country to fulfil the skills shortages that are in this economy, because we will be spending more on engineering projects, the number of schools that we are building. The investment in Wairarapa College, for example—$10 million directly into the Wairarapa College upgrade. That is just an example of what we can see in every electorate because we have options, we have the choice. The growing economy gives us the option to spend more money on hospitals, to spend more money on education, to build more classrooms, to build better roads—these are the things that only a National Government can deliver, because we are the Government that grabs the opportunity and contributes to the growing economy. We are going to repay debt. We are going to bring debt down, as a percentage of GDP, to between 10 and 15 percent by 2025—that is more aggressive than the Opposition would have in its policies. Those members have no interest in repaying debt; they would rather spend people’s money than make this economy more resilient.

Carmel Sepuloni: Be honest—less debt under a Labour Government than under a National Government.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Well, the Opposition policy, of course, is not to decrease tax. Those members voted against the Family Incomes Package.

Carmel Sepuloni: We voted against tax cuts.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: They voted against tax cuts; that is exactly right. The implication, of course, is that they would love to see tax hikes, and there is no denying that from the Opposition—beware. The Prime Minister, just in the weekend, talked about being able to do more of the same, given a National Government—returning more taxpayer money to their pockets by investing more in infrastructure, in schools, in roads, and in—

Carmel Sepuloni: Meanwhile, 41,000 people homeless.

ALASTAIR SCOTT: Well, the Opposition policy is to build 100,000 like that, without any consideration of costs or where they are going to be built. This Government has a very organised plan. There are going to be 8,000 Housing New Zealand Corporation properties turned into 34,000 houses—social houses and market houses. That is what this Government is doing—considered and pragmatic policy and initiative.

This Budget is—

Fletcher Tabuteau: Do you have to wait for the bell or something? What’s going on?

ALASTAIR SCOTT: No, no, I do not have to wait for the bell, Mr Tabuteau. There is a lot to talk about—there is a lot to talk about. I am going to start talking about something that the Labour Party does not like talking about, and that is that this Government helps people who can least help themselves. This Family Incomes Package talked about accommodation supplements being raised and whole areas of Auckland being reclassified from No. 2 to the top priority, meaning that rather than 16 percent of those receiving accommodation in the top priority, now over 30 percent of those receiving the accommodation allowance will receive the top amount eligible. That is a good thing. Family tax credits—again, targeted at those who are least well off, targeted at those who have low incomes. [Interruption] I know, Mr Tabuteau, you struggle with it. You did vote for it. Of course, the tax thresholds were changed—again, to support families working and taxpayer families.

This is all able to be achieved because of the National Government’s policies—sensible policies that encourage economic growth; policies that support free-trade agreements, which the Opposition does not support; policies that accept, encourage, and demand increasing the number of immigrants into skilled labour—again, something that the Opposition wants to oppose, because it would rather have this place slow down. This place is going too fast, too well, too successfully—things are going too nicely for the Opposition to accept, and it wants to slow the place down. It wants to put up barriers to trade, it wants to put up barriers to immigration and the importing of skilled labour, and it wants to stop this economy from growing. That is going to make it very simple for the voter coming up to make a very clear decision, because it is very obvious that this Budget supports New Zealanders. It supports all New Zealanders across the entire country. Thank you.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, kia ora. Well, you know it is time for a change of Government when even the Government MPs are calling it “9 long years”. I do not know how many times Alastair Scott, in the previous contribution, called it 9 long years of National. It felt like 9 years just listening to that speech. If viewers wondered why that last member kept looking up during the speech, he was looking at the clock, because after 9 long years there still was not anything to fill 10 minutes of a speech with. It was painful to watch him constantly looking up and seeing the clock count down.

I am proud to rise and oppose strongly these bills, the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill. For those who mischaracterised the Green Party’s position during the Budget that we were supporting the Budget, you will see us in this debate voting against the Budget. We voted for the pay equity and the Working for Families threshold changes, but we oppose this Budget—we oppose this Budget loudly, strongly, and passionately, just like we oppose this National Government loudly, strongly, and passionately. After 9 long years, the environment is still being failed by the Government, our families are still being failed by this Government, and our economy is still being failed by this Government.

Now, remember, this bill we are dealing with today deals with some of the changes we have seen since the 2016 Budget. That was called, by Steven Joyce, the “innovation Budget”. What we did not see was much real money for innovation; we simply saw money being moved around in different funding pots and given new names. We saw, since then, a survey come out, which James Shaw has been speaking about, that fewer businesses are actually undertaking research and development in New Zealand since then, and we are still seeing New Zealand in the bottom half of the developed world for spending on innovation. In fact, the only innovation that came out of the 2016 Budget was how successful National has been at PR gimmicks, at moving money around. This is a Government that is all about the spin—it is all about the sizzle, not the actual sausage. There is no actual substance within it, and you see it in the other policies and the other issues.

Let us take rivers: it is an absolute travesty and an indictment of policy that in two-thirds of our rivers, our kids risk getting sick if they swim in them. So what did the Government do? It simply changed the definition of “swimmable” so that it looked like it was delivering swimmable rivers—an absolute sham. We can see it with the electric vehicle targets. Here it announced the policy eight different times in eight different locations, announcing a target for electric vehicles that is actually less than its official do-nothing scenario. You can see it in how it kicks for touch with these targets that are literally decades in the future when none of the current Ministers are going to be held accountable because it is literally decades in the future. So climate change—reducing 50 percent by 2050. You can see it with superannuation changes; they are decades away. And you can see it with pest-free New Zealand, where the target is literally so far in the future that none of them will be held responsible. This is the real innovation. We are seeing a change in how our Government is being run. It is not on substance. It is about these empty targets. It is about the PR spin. It is about these gimmicks.

In the real world, what we do see as a result of the Budget is that New Zealand is going from one of the most equal to one of the most unequal countries, just across my lifetime. What we see is our children going hungry in New Zealand. Annually, we are seeing 40,000 trips being made to hospital by kids because they are sick as a result of their housing. For 60 years now we have been progressively dropping down those economic rankings, and now we work some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages and pay some of the highest costs of living in the entire developed world. For 40 years now we have imported more than we have exported, so we have to sell assets to stay afloat, and debt has literally gone through the roof under National.

This is exactly what we saw in the recent OECD economic report that came out recently. What it said was that any short-term growth that we have seen has been driven by migration and some construction activity, but, over the long term, it is being undermined because of our low productivity, the pollution from farming and agriculture, and the high and growing greenhouse gas pollution.

So when you look at productivity, the Budget had absolutely nothing for it. There was no additional boost in investment in R & D that is actually going to lift us out of the bottom half of the entire developed world, which sees our scientists paid four times less than the OECD average. There was nothing over those 9 long years to boost our productivity as an economy, and nothing substantially to move us out from the R & D bottom rank. The Green Party has proposed the idea of a Minister for manufacturing, because what we have seen is some huge challenges facing that sector. Why does the Government not come up with some bold ideas like a Minister for manufacturing?

The OECD also highlighted the fault of the Government through its financial and economic management of protecting the environment. It signalled this out. It is a tragedy that you cannot swim in two-thirds of our lowland lakes and streams because they are so polluted as a result of intensive agriculture. So when you look at the Budget, there is a trifling amount—$1 million for a new freshwater fund. There is $80 million for investing, or subsidising from the taxpayer, intensive agriculture. For $1 for cleaning up rivers there is $80 for polluting them. You can see it is the same for climate change, where our emissions continue to grow through the roof—our net emissions. We saw a $4 million funding increase regarding climate change, but then we saw a $300 million increase for subsidising polluters under our emissions trading scheme.

Just stop and think for a sec: $4 million for tackling climate change, but 10 times that amount just in taxpayer subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. There is $4 million for protecting the climate and 10 times that for increasing pollution. You can see it—$4 million in terms of action for climate change and nearly $10 billion over 4 years for spending on new roads and motorways, which are simply going to increase pollution.

So what you see under National after those 9 long years is a continual failure for our environment, failure for our families, an increase in poverty, an increase in homeless, and, in fact, our economy is worse as a result in real terms. But that is why I say it is a real chance for change in a few months’ time. Our vision is a New Zealand where you can swim in our pristine rivers and lakes and you are not going to get sick, where you can explore our beautiful environment that every New Zealander loves—and it defines us in the world; our relationship with nature—and where you can still see some of our endangered species in the wild. It is a New Zealand where we say no to poverty. Too many people are in work, in study, or on a benefit but are in abject poverty. We can commit to an end to poverty.

We can commit to a goal of the right of every New Zealander to have a house—and not only that, a warm, dry house that is not going to make you sick—a New Zealand where you can live in more livable cities that are pollution free, where you have got fantastic public transport choices to get around faster and cheaper; and a New Zealand with 100 percent clean energy that is pulling its weight on the world stage. This is the vision of an alternate New Zealand, which you could see with the Green Party, because it is the exact contrast of what we see after 9 long years of National. But the good thing is that after 9 long years, change is coming.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): It is a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to this, the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill. I just want to start by acknowledging Mr Nash and his contribution. He openly called New Zealand First policy development for the decades-old problems that the country is experiencing “fresh”. I just wish that he and the Labour Party would acknowledge the source of their policy development.

In more acknowledgment, I would like to give the greatest insult I possibly can give to Mr Bishop, because he deserves it today. He deserves it today. The greatest insult I could give to Mr Bishop is that he sounded exactly like the former Finance and Expenditure Committee chairman. He sounded exactly like Minister David Bennett. That is a sad indictment on Mr Bishop. When I was new, 3 years or 2½ years ago, I thought Mr Bishop had a lot of smart things to say, but he summarised not only himself but the National Government and just how tired it really is. It was an indictment on Mr Bishop.

What I would say—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: So on to the Budget—on to the Budget.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Oh, I am just replying—oh, sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not mean to contest your ruling, but I am just replying to speakers who have spoken before me. On to the Budget—

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, just because they were breaking the rules it does not give you a licence. Have a crack at the Budget before you have a crack at them.

FLETCHER TABUTEAU: Oh, come on. OK, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will attempt to acknowledge the contribution from Minister Joyce, then, and I will try to relate it to the Budget. He struggled, but I will try to do that myself.

He actually changed the position of National’s spin, because he said it was an appropriations bill that is delivering for New Zealanders. Now, I do not know whether you noticed, but that is actually just a very subtle but important change for National, because just a few days ago, at a conference, the Prime Minister said it was delivering for all New Zealanders. Now the message has changed. Clearly, with this Budget, and with the imprest supply legislation and with the appropriation supplement that we are seeing in this bill, Mr Joyce does not think he can, at least, deliver for all New Zealanders. The Government has got a problem, and he does not want to say it in case we actually ask some fair and reasonable questions about how he is doing that for the homeless of New Zealand and those waiting on waiting lists to get into our hospitals, just as a short example.

In recent days the Prime Minister, whilst undermining his integrity built up over the last 20 years or so, showed us two things: the bored and tired political campaign that National will inflict on the New Zealand public, best typified by the tweet he gave out: “We lead a Government that is delivering for all New Zealanders.”—this is what he said. There were actually a few people who, thankfully, asked the question of what he means by delivering for all New Zealanders. There is something not quite right about that. It was a blatant throwaway line that means nothing, and it is typified by not only the Budget that Mr Joyce, in his lolly scramble, released earlier this year but in this appropriations supplementary estimates bill.

The other thing he suggested—and this is more to what Mr Joyce was saying earlier in his contribution. That is to say that Mr Joyce spoke about what the Government is delivering for New Zealand, and he used some wonderful words and some wonderful terminology, and he quoted GDP, as the members opposite are oft wont to do. But let us just dig a little bit deeper. He spoke about a surplus. I put it to the House that any clown can set up an expenditure and revenue column and tell the country what they are going to spend, and then anybody can not spend what they said they were going to spend and call it a surplus. That is what this Government has done with these numbers.

I will just go through—he talked about building and housing. From the bill on the Christchurch rebuild, there was money in this bill allocated for the Government to give to the council. I think it was over $2 million. If you look at the supplementary estimates bill and the schedule, you will see that that money—$2 million—was not given. So there is an example of how a Government can obtain a surplus. Health, safety, and—sorry, Mr Deputy Speaker—weathertightness. Weathertightness was the other one. There was $4.2 million allocated to weathertightness in the Budget, but in this bill—not spent. The Government wants permission not to spend it, and that is what that Government is going to pass today in this House. It is just, I put it to the House, unacceptable.

Years of woeful neglect have left this country massively ill-prepared for the mass immigration that this country is seeing coming through our borders every day, with a population the size of Rotorua coming into New Zealand every year. What has the Government done about it for the last 3 or 4 years? Absolutely nothing, except encourage this unsustainable number coming into the country. What has that meant?

Minister Joyce spoke about being the infrastructure Government, but what he failed to mention is that he has not spent a penny on core, desperately needed infrastructure, just to cope with the huge increase in population here in New Zealand. We are talking about a population the size of Rotorua every year. So how many schools does that represent? There are 12 schools, right there. Have that many schools been built in Auckland or around the country just to cope with that? No. Police, health, education, hospitals, clinics, GPs, police on our streets—it is just not happening, and now, all of a sudden, the Government is in catch-up mode and telling the country that it has got more construction out there than ever before. It is pitiful and it is woefully inadequate, but the Government is trying to sell it to the country like it had a plan; it did not. It is in catch-up mode.

One of the best examples to typify that was the Budget spending not allocated to 65,000—ah, here it is, here. Over the next 5 years, demand for construction workers will be 65,000. They will need to be trade qualified. The Government has cut tertiary funding. The Government has no real plan, and from the legislation we are debating—supposed to be debating—today, I took this as one example of the irony of the situation. We need more skilled workers. We need people to build more homes—actually, we need the Government to take accountability and we need the Government to take ownership of that, and have New Zealanders build homes. But here is one ironic example: we need all of this by 2020, and we see from this bill we are debating today that the Government held back $2 million on transportation for public schools. How does that work? This is contributing to its so-called surplus. That is how it achieves a surplus: $2 million that it is not giving to our kids, who need to get to school. I bet you anything you like that that adversely and disproportionately affects our rural and regional kids, who want desperately to get to school, but, my goodness, this Government makes it incredibly, incredibly hard for them. It is so frustrating to speak about it in the House.

District health boards (DHBs) were another example I took from this legislation. There was $5.5 million held back from health and disability support services from the Bay of Plenty District Heath Board, the DHB in the area that I live—$5.5 million not handed out from this Budget to health and disability support services. There was $6.3 million held back from Capital and Coast District Heath Board, $7.4 million not spent on Counties Manukau, and $8 million from the Waikato District Heath Board. All of that, I put it to the members opposite, helped to create the surplus that they are so proud of.

That is the reality for this country, and we do not have the money being spent on infrastructure that we need. The spend so far is not going to catch us up to the start—when this Government started—and we need so much more for New Zealand. Thank you.

STUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): It is a pleasure to speak on the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill and the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill. I say that because the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill has quite a lot of impact on the earthquake damage in Kaikōura, which I want to talk a little bit about. I would also point out that the Edgecumbe flooding event and the Port Hills fire—all of those things were reliant on some of that funding coming through in that supplementary estimates bill.

I think that our Minister of Finance, Steven Joyce, really walked a delicate line in putting a Budget together, between spending money where it is needed and ensuring that we are able to get our books in a state where we are able to actually respond to events like those. Getting debt down by 2020 to 20 percent of GDP—Government debt, that is—is a really important target, but we have got another target. We are going further than that, and we are going to aim to get to 10 to 15 percent of GDP for Government debt by 2025. There is no doubt that we will have an Alpine Fault rupture event at some point in the future, and there is no point in casting around the world trying to borrow money to respond to an event like that at extremely high interest rates, because our debt-to-GDP ratio makes foreign borrowers very nervous, and that is what would happen. So I applaud the Minister of Finance for actually being very successful on that.

If I could just, for a moment, talk a little bit about what some of that money in the Budget is going towards: we did see $17.5 million go towards the earthquake support subsidy. That money supported 862 businesses, which have gone forward now and have got through that point, but we have now got money for an assistance grant for those businesses that are in need of it. Can I tell you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and the House, that since the earthquake, business is actually booming in Kaikōura. However, there are businesses that are not doing so well. But the amount of money flowing around through that economy—because when you are spending over $1 billion to reinstate the rail and road corridor, it inevitably spills over into the community in which it is being spent. To see all of the people on the street in high-vis gear and spending their money—all of the people who are accommodated in the 300-bed temporary accommodation village are all given a chit to eat at a local restaurant in town. So that is a really tangible way to assist the local economy and local people while they are reinstating their vital links to enable their businesses to respond and get back on their feet.

There was also $5.7 million that went to reinstate the harbour. That work is still going on. I had the pleasure of seeing the work being completed there. There was an Australian group that was working off a barge, dredging the harbour with a digger. It was very fascinating to see that barge as it walked itself along—it has large piles—and cleaned out the harbour to make it safe to navigate. That is vital, because the tourism businesses that are vital for the recovery of that town have to use that harbour. That is the only way they can get their tourists out to see the whales and other features on the water. So that money has been very well put to use, and is still being put to use, and that is a vital part of those supplementary estimates.

There was also—going to the highway and the rail corridor—extra money that came in for that. That is a vital amount of expenditure as well. I was there to see the first train get through to Kaikōura from the south, and that is a great fillip for everybody in the community.

However, having said that, there is a lot more to do. They have just reached the halfway point in clearing all of the slips, and it is fantastic to get to that point. After the earthquake it was estimated that there were 370,000 cubic metres of material to move on the northern corridor, but after these two cyclones went through that went up to 600,000 cubic metres of material, so it is a phenomenal amount of material to move. We did, in this House, pass some enabling legislation for Orders in Council, but that was not to enable the Government to be a vandal and push stuff into the sea; it just enabled a truncation of the Resource Management Act processes, and that was very much appreciated. That money is still being spent. We hope that it will be completed in time, in December, and it is all looking good at this stage. But who knows what can happen, in terms of natural events, along the way. Getting that right, I think, is a really important part of New Zealand’s economy. It is important, also, to have a Minister of Finance who enables the economy to be in a position to respond to another event should one come along in the near future. Let us hope it does not, but having Government debt down will enable us to respond in the future.

There has been a lot of talk about R & D, a little bit before. I thought the member from New Zealand First, who normally likes to give an academic approach to these matters, was a wee bit off-piste, I should say. It was a wee bit disappointing; in fact, it was rather disappointing, and I expected a little bit more. However, having said that, I think that the R & D and how well we are responding to that—there was a very good example of that this morning when we saw Emirates Team New Zealand spending less money than anyone else in getting a boat to beat the world at its game. It was a technology company, of all things, that was running the other programme.

How this relates to the Budget, of course, is that we have got things like Callaghan Innovation, which is funded through the Budget, and other different quangos that are out there helping businesses with their R & D. But Government does not start businesses, Government does not export goods, and Government does not employ people in export industries. It is businesses and individuals that do that. Where they invest their money—and they do a great job of doing it and taking a risk—R & D is a major part of that. But to do that the businesses have to have confidence that they are going to get somewhere. It is very easy to have a lofty target and say: “Let’s spend X percent of GDP on R & D.” It has got to be sensible money spent in the right area, and the people to make those decisions are those export businesses. They are those businesses and companies owned by individuals that have to have a vision. They have to have a product.

Another example that we have, which started quite small and is rapidly getting quite large, is Rocket Lab with Peter Beck. The Electron rocket is quite revolutionary, and that could turn into a major business for New Zealand. That has taken Government money and investment, but it is not the Government that did the R & D; it is actually a private business. Those private businesses—from all the ones that I have been interacting with anyway, recently, since the Budget—and the individual businesses are all in favour of the balance that our finance Minister has taken on this Budget. I think it has been phenomenal, and I congratulate him on it.

So a lot of capital has been set aside for capital expenditure over the next four Budgets—$11 billion, which will take that to $32.5 billion over 4 years in total. That is a phenomenal amount of money to put aside to invest in much-needed infrastructure. In the South Island practically every hospital is going to be rebuilt. There is a phenomenal amount of money going into that. That also highlights in the South Island—I know that here in the National Government, which is a Government for the regions, we get into the South Island and what is the biggest issue facing the regions? It is actually people to work in our businesses. So how do we do that? Immigration—and I am really disappointed by the Opposition parties saying that our economy is based on immigration; it is not. Immigration is actually supporting our growth. It is not causing our growth; it is supporting it. We could take hundreds of people tomorrow in small communities in the South Island if we had them, but we do not have them. We try to get them in. We try to get them off the benefits and they do not—[Interruption] I know those members do not like it. It is a difficult thing for them to swallow, but if you do not have the right policies that appeal to people, that is why people are deserting you in the numbers that they are.

The National Government is about growth. It is about the regions. I have great pleasure in commending both these bills to the House. Thank you.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. Barry Coates—5 minutes.

BARRY COATES (Green): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. I rise to address this bill. This is about the Supplementary Estimates for the current Budget. Since it is about the Budget, this is about confidence in the current Government. What I want to do is go back to the speech from Bill English, when he was Minister of Finance, to look at what the Government’s priorities were for this Budget that we are commenting on, and to look at the degree to which the Government has met those priorities and what these revised estimates are therefore about. The finance Minister at that stage said that there were four priorities, and I will run through those.

The first priority was a growing economy. But, you know, if you look at the economic growth figures in GDP—gross domestic product—per capita, they have fallen for the last two quarters. We are in a technical recession. That cannot be called a growing economy. Even that level of growth is there only because it has been propped up by housing speculation, which has seen house prices rise again by 6.7 percent over the past year, and by the foreign students debacle, where foreign students were brought into New Zealand under false pretences and under fraud, and then the foreign students were victimised and blamed for the fraud. We have seen massive tax breaks for foreign investors. We have seen multinational companies not paying their fair share of taxes and all sorts of tax breaks for wealthy individuals. As a result of this economic mismanagement, New Zealand is slipping down, again, the OECD’s ladder of productivity, which is the real measure of our productive economy. What we have seen is that the economy is not growing, and even that anaemic non-growth is founded on unsustainable foundations.

The second priority was fixing the infrastructure. What we have seen on that is a continued obsession by the Government on roads, even when the benefit-cost ratios have been very low. For example, in Auckland, we have seen further Government opposition to the City Rail Link and a delay in finding the mechanism where Aucklanders can at last escape the congestion that sees them spending more time in their cars than they do on vacation. That is the kind of under-investment over 9 years of this Government that has led our infrastructure to be horribly, horribly under-invested. We see it in the regions, where regions are struggling with growing numbers of tourism but without the money to be able to invest in tourism infrastructure. Where we have seen the Government putting money is into prisons. What an indictment of Government policy that is, that more and more prisons are required for the Government’s failure.

We have seen an obsession from the finance Minister on social investment—the third priority. The social investment package was so badly managed, in fact, that community-based organisations and NGOs were being asked to divulge confidential information about their clients at the stage where Government departments were still sending out that confidential information to other people, without proper controls.

Finally, the fourth area of priority was investment in health. As we have seen, there is under-investment in health under this Government totalling about $500 million a year, according to Infometrics. We have seen the gross neglect of mental health so that teen suicide rates in New Zealand are amongst the highest in the world. We have seen neglect and underfunding of aged care that leaves our older people with no proper care facilities.

This is a situation where the Government does not have the numbers. It should not be allowing Todd Barclay to vote in Parliament. It does not have the numbers. It does not have the mandate. It does not have the confidence of the New Zealand people. We are proud of our America’s Cup team, we are proud of our All Blacks, we are proud of our Black Ferns, but we are not proud of our Government. It is time that it left and there was a change of Government. Thank you.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I call Michael Wood—5 minutes.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Can I start by acknowledging our friends from the Lions tour in the gallery. It was good to see your friends on Saturday night at Eden Park, and we welcome you to our Parliament.

I am here to speak to the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill, unlike many members of this House, who have not actually spoken to that bill in their contributions, and I have been thinking about why it might be that many members have struggled with that. Here is the bill that we are actually speaking about. It is a doorstopper. This bill, the supplementary estimates bill, is about all of the mistakes that the Government made in the Budget last year. It is about all of the things it got wrong and is having to fix up now. That is what it is about, and I think the challenge for many speakers in the debate today is about trying to cram this into only 5 or 10 minutes, but none the less I am going to do my very best with that.

I want to start by talking about what we have seen in the Supplementary Estimates in respect of revenue, a portfolio dear to my heart. Relatively recently, the National Government has had a new, harder-working revenue Minister, who is really cracking the whip on things, but what the Supplementary Estimates reveal is that there are a whole lot of things that have actually gone wrong in the revenue area and have had to be fixed up in this document.

One of the things that stood out for me is the fact that the investigations budget was underspent by $2.7 million. It was underspent by $2.7 million in the same year that that Government—that Government itself—has conceded that multinational corporations are ripping New Zealand taxpayers off to the tune of $300 million a year. So, at the same time as we need to be going after the big guys, we are cutting back on the investigations budget in this very document. Alongside that, we have cut back by $15 million on the information we give to New Zealand taxpayers about their obligations, making it harder for them to know the right amount of tax for them to pay. That just shows the wrong priorities of this Government.

Flicking through a few of the other areas that have not already been canvassed in the excellent speeches by my Labour colleagues, I want to turn to courts. I was reminded of this because, of course, the Deputy Speaker, who was previously in the Chair, was a very good and very active former Minister for Courts. If you went down Lambton Quay today, I do not think that anyone would even know who the current Minister for Courts is, and that is probably lucky. It is probably lucky because if you look in this document, the Supplementary Estimates, there is a shocking figure. It is that the impairment for fines that should have been paid to the Government was supposed to be $12 million in the Budget last year, but that has rocketed by over 100 percent and is now up to $29 million. That is an absolute blowout, an absolute stuff-up, and an absolute example of governmental incompetence in this document, which Government Ministers are about to vote through.

We flick on a few pages later and we find out why. We find out why. It is because the Government slashed the amount of money to spend on courts and fines collection. Well, it does not take a genius to work out that when you reduce the amount you spend on fines collection, you might get fewer fines coming in, and that is exactly what is happening in this document, which those Government members are about to vote for. Where is the accountability for that? Once again, they are the wrong priorities.

Urban cycleways—the pet project and probably the best achievement of the previous National Prime Minister, John Key. It did not really change the world or the economy, but it was a pretty good sort of niche project. What do the Supplementary Estimates tell us? We were supposed to spend $43 million on that project to build more urban cycleways, but because of poor planning, we managed to spend only $27 million of that. That was one of this Government’s hallmark projects and it could not even deliver that properly over the last year, and so we have had to adjust that in the supplementary estimates.

The most shocking thing I have seen, actually, in the Supplementary Estimates really speaks to us about what this Government is getting wrong. It was a question I asked in the Finance and Expenditure Committee about the changes in the number of people receiving hardship assistance. These are the people who are really, really doing it hard and who need help from the Government. This tells us how well this Government is doing at helping those in need, which those members constantly stand up and boast about. It tells us that last year, 5,000 more people needed special benefit, and it tells us that 102,000 more special needs grants had to be paid last year, which is up from 489,000 to 592,000. That is a sign of people being left behind, despite what this Government has said.

In his contribution before, Mr Bishop accused the Labour Party of talking too much about vision and aspiration. Well, we are guilty as charged on that front. We have vision for a country in which we spend less on prisons, not more. We are guilty of having a vision for a country in which we have decent homes for all New Zealanders and decent incomes for every New Zealand householder—good health and good education, not tax cuts for the wealthy. We oppose this bill and the Budget, and we will deliver a much better one next year. Thank you.

JOANNE HAYES (National): I stand to take a call on the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. When I heard that previous speaker, Michael Wood’s, kōrero, I thought: “Oh my gosh! He has obviously overlooked the $2 billion Family Incomes Package that they never even supported.” Labour members talk about supporting those on low incomes and all the rest of it and think that they have a say over that when they cannot even support this $2 billion Family Incomes Package.

That was the hallmark of our Budget for 2017, and it, actually, was met with great admiration out on the street, not only by the people who will be receiving this amazing package but also by the organisations that actually work with these people as well. So when I look across at the Opposition and the way that it rubbished the 2017 Budget, I think: “Well, there is no vision there; there is no aspiration there. There is no going anywhere in that group across the House.”

I want to talk a little bit about the children, young persons, and their families, Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry for Vulnerable Children, because this is the second-biggest investment to support vulnerable children over many years—over 30 years, actually. A little bit of history about that—in 2016, the Minister for Social Development, the Hon Anne Tolley, had been working on reviewing the Child, Youth and Family organisation, and some of the reports that came out from that investigation were found wanting. They found a system that did not place children at the centre of its organisation; it was not meeting the needs of vulnerable young children. The organisation was fragmented. There was a lack of clear accountability, and there was not any organised common purpose around the organisation. That, therefore, bore the start of the Ministry for Vulnerable Children.

From 2016 to 2017 the Minister has fastidiously looked at the way the organisation is set up, and, thereto, $434.1 million was set aside in the Budget to be invested in the ministry—that is $424.2 million in operating funding over 4 years for that organisation, $2.3 million for the 2016-17 period, and $7.5 million for capital funding. When we start to look at that, we see this is a Government that is serious about helping young children, young youth, within the system. Not only was that funding put in for the ministry but also there was the establishment of the youth group. The youth group members were advisers to the Minister and to the researchers who were setting up Oranga Tamariki. These were the young people who said: “We want to have a say. We want to make sure that the new establishment, the new organisation that will come forward, will be by us and for us.” I believe that through the Minister’s hard work with her advisers, we have actually been able to get there.

A little bit more evidence around that—recently we had a meeting with the CEO of the Ministry for Vulnerable Children, and she said her scariest time, when she applied for the job and went through the interview process, was actually the interview with the youth expert panel. She was so very nervous about facing them and showing them that she meant what she was saying and that it was not a false interview. I guess that for that period of her interview she came through, and the rangatahi on that expert panel could see that she meant what she was saying.

We have also, within this Budget, put aside or invested $26.4 million to support 4,500 caregivers of children. That is really important because sometimes it is difficult when you are looking after young people and your personal budget is very tight, and so to be able to support the caregivers of these children through this $26.4 million—it goes some way towards ensuring that the caregivers are actually able to do a good job of looking after these young people.

We have also invested $94.4 million to meet some of the ministry’s cost pressures through this Budget. It has had a number of them. With the restructure of Child, Youth and Family into the ministry, and all the other machinations that are going on within the ministry, there has obviously been quite a bit of cost pressure. So $94.4 million will actually assist the ministry to overcome those cost pressures.

We have invested another $71 million to extend support for youth aged between 17 and 18 years. This was a contention as we were going through, discussing this with some of the people who came along to the select committee. But I think where we got to, with the 17- to 18-year olds—I think it is a very good place to get to, because they seemed to be the young people who were missing out when the age for supporting them stopped at 17. So we are able to extend that by another year, and then also to put some support around those up to age 25.

There is $28.1 million for Family Start, an intensive home-visiting programme. Family Start has been one of those contracts that community organisations have had, and it has been quite difficult—I know, because I came from that sector—for some of the providers to be able to do a good job around Family Start. There has been some review of the actual services of Family Start, and now we are starting to get to a place where Family Start is starting to be embedded a bit better into the organisations. So that is $28.1 million invested in there, through this Budget.

Finally, there is $11.7 million over 2 years to trial and evaluate community-based remand placements. It is all very well having all of these things happening, but it is really key to be able to make sure that the investment is actually working, and with the remand placements, those have been some of the areas whereby an evaluation of those placements will let us know how well things are going with the investment.

As I said, we had the $2 billion Family Incomes Package to lift after-tax incomes. That was targeted at low-income families. It will increase the $14,000 income-tax threshold to $22,000, and the $48,000 threshold to $52,000. This means more money in the pockets of those people who deserve to have it. That is looking at an average of about an additional $26 into people’s pockets. Some people might say: “Well, that’s not enough.” Well, it is more than what they had yesterday, and it will carry on into their future. I can see that through this investment into the Family Incomes Package many, many families—we are looking at thousands and thousands of families—will actually benefit from this. That is 20,000 households—the household incomes threshold. Those are the people who will actually benefit from that. That is reducing the number of children living in families that are receiving less than half the median income by around 50,000. This is what this Family Incomes Package—it is targeted at children. It is targeted at families with children. I am really pleased to stand here and tautoko this particular area of the Budget.

I just want to finish off my kōrero by giving a little brief talk about the Canterbury rebuild and the amount of capital investment that this Government has put into the Canterbury rebuild. We are looking at $4.7 billion across health, education, social housing, and more. In my electorate of Christchurch East we are looking at a number of primary schools that are brand new, plus the community college Haeata. That school is thriving. Yes, it has its ups and downs, as all schools do. All schools have their ups and downs. But through the principal, Andy Kai Fong—he is doing an amazing job of bringing together ages, from 5 years old all the way to 18 years old, and being able to deliver educational packages that actually respond to each of those individual age groups. I have visited the school. I have met with Andy a number of times. I have even met with 15- to 18-year-olds. I can tell you, the investment we have put in there is paying off. I have no hesitation in supporting this legislation. Kia ora.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Labour will be opposing this legislation. Labour will be opposing this legislation for a very simple reason: it does not deliver for New Zealanders. We have just heard a number of things from the previous speaker who has just sat down, Joanne Hayes. I want to pick up where she left off, and that is with Christchurch schools. I want to challenge that member to ask her ministerial colleagues and the Prime Minister to come to Christchurch and apologise for the appalling process they ran in closing and merging our schools in our city. It was so bad that last week the Ombudsman issued a report pointing to the psychological harm that that Government did in the city of Christchurch, with the way it botched the process. To the speaker who has just finished speaking, I challenge her to ask her colleagues to front up and apologise to the people of Christchurch for that.

The previous speaker also attempted the Government’s spin that this was a family package that delivered for families. Well, the speaker is deluding herself. This Government is simply not being straight with New Zealanders, because, let us be really clear, this is a tax cut that delivers the most to the highest-earning New Zealanders. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers get only 20 percent of the benefit from this tax package. This is what Chris Bishop so elegantly said was a package that was delivering for the bottom of the heap. Well, I say to Mr Bishop: you are talking about 50 percent of New Zealanders when you call them the “bottom of the heap”. That is not only arrogant; it is offensive and it is emblematic of a Government that is out of ideas. It is tired, and it has got absolutely no idea what life is like for ordinary people. I think that is a statement from Mr Bishop that he should come down and apologise for.

But after 9 years in Government—and even the Government Ministers are having to point to it being 9 very long years—is there anything in this Budget to fix the housing crisis? No, there is not. The Government has failed to do anything to address the housing crisis. What there is is there is an accommodation supplement. We have said that we would support the accommodation supplement. Are we supporting the increased payments on the accommodation supplement because we think this is a fundamental way to address housing issues in this country? No; it is not. It is recognition that people are struggling to put a roof over their heads, but accommodation supplements are not a long-term strategy for addressing a housing crisis, and that is all this Government can come up with.

What we heard was one of the previous speakers say that we had a wish list to build 100,000 houses. No, we do not have a wish list. We have a plan, and it is something that this Government lacks. This Government has no ambition and no plan to address the housing crisis in this country. What we have is a Government that is content to sit back, and, for an increasing number of New Zealanders, housing is seen as a luxury—a luxury that they cannot afford. That is not something we are willing to stand by. This is a Government that lacks any ambition about it.

But let us have a look at some of the other things. If you are delivering for families, I would expect there to be some good boosts for health, so that people can afford to get the kind of healthcare they need. Was that in this Budget? No, it certainly was not. There was a monumental botch-up in terms of what was going to which district health board and a lot of egg on the face for the Government, which had to be corrected after. This is a Government that cannot even count properly, to put the money in the right place in what will be its final Budget.

What we had was the Minister of Health calling out that we on this side of the House had a wish list. I do have a wish list, and my wish list is that when an 8-year-old expresses suicidal thoughts, they do not have to wait for longer than 12 weeks to see a professional. That is what is happening. That is what this Government thinks is a wish list.

We held a very successful public meeting in Christchurch last Wednesday night, when well over 350 people packed into the Transitional Cathedral to talk about this issue—to talk about mental health, particularly youth mental health in Christchurch. I have to say, it was one of the most moving political meetings that I have ever been to. A lot of very brave people stood up and shared their experiences of their struggle in the system and of this Government that has let them down. It has consistently underfunded Christchurch’s mental health service at a time when that city needed it the most, and people feel so let down and so abandoned by a Government. I do not see the provision of those basics as a wish list. It is concerning to me that that is what this Government sees. It thinks about wish lists when it sees that.

Did this Government deliver to schools in this Budget? Did this Government seek to restart and refill for schools the $158 million in operational funding that it needed to make up the shortfall? No, it did not. Instead we have our schools again struggling through with frozen operations grants, needing to use their operational grants to fund teacher-aides, increasingly, to get through in the face of the kinds of pressures that they are facing. And what are those schools doing? They are forced to pass those costs on to parents. They are increasingly asking parents to dip into their hip pocket to pay for the whiteboard markers, to pay for the photocopier paper, and to pay for the tissues. When I went to school, the school provided the chalk. The school does not provide the equivalent in many places now; parents are being asked to provide that, because this Government is underfunding the operational grants of our schools, and that is something that cannot be ignored.

Another issue that has been raised by speakers around the appropriations in turn is the Canterbury rebuild. Well, I have a question for the Ministers associated with that portfolio. I want to know whether the impairment of investment in Southern Response services, the additional $444 million—when will the Government come clean on Southern Response and tell us how much money is actually going to be spent and when the end date is? I think many New Zealanders have lost sight of the fact that there are literally thousands of Cantabrians who are still waiting for their insurance settlement to come through, who are still waiting to get on with their life. They are still arguing with Southern Response, they are still arguing with the Earthquake Commission, or they are having to have their botched repair repaired for another time. That is something that this Government simply is not delivering on and something that absolutely has to be addressed.

I would also like to touch on R & D spending, which Stuart Smith brought up, saying how great all this is and how it is that we cannot set unrealistic targets like matching the rest of the developed world in terms of investing in research and development. Well, when the Minister of Science and Innovation came to the select committee and I suggested to him that perhaps we should have a measure to see how well our spending was being used, he said the only measure he wanted to use was how much money was being spent. This is a Government that is unwilling to look at how its spend is going. That is a Government that, perversely, will not let businesses make those decisions for themselves. This is a Government that will not back an R & D tax credit to put that control back into the hands of businesses.

Then we had, quite frankly, a bizarre speech from one of the members of the Government benches about immigration and about how our policy was going to starve the regions of the workers that they needed. Well, I suggest they actually read; it can be quite an enlightening experience. If they did read our policy, what they would see is that we do not have an income threshold of when you are allowed in this country. Instead, we are going to allow regions to put together skills shortage lists and decide what it is that they need in their region. We have seen this work quite successfully in Canterbury over the last few years, and we are going to ask regions to do that on a region-by-region basis. I can tell you it is very popular in the South Island, and I see there could well be a local MP listed on the skills shortage list in Clutha-Southland, as the party struggles to fill that spot.

We oppose—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The member’s time has expired.

NUK KORAKO (National): Kia ora e Te Māngai o Te Whare, huri noa i Te Whare nei e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa.

[Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and acknowledgments to you all throughout this House.]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. As the final speaker, it was unfortunate to hear the previous speaker, Megan Woods, particularly someone from Christchurch—and I am not sure whether she has been in Christchurch over the last few years, particularly when we look at the incredible developments that have taken place there since 2011.

If she only looked across the world and went to L’Aquila or went to New Orleans, she would see that they are still looking for development and that not even 50 percent of it has been done. But if we look at Christchurch, $17.5 billion from the New Zealand taxpayer through this Government is what we have actually seen in this incredible development in Christchurch.

There are two areas—key areas—that I want to speak to or cover in this bill. The first one is talking about one of those Christchurch electorates, the Port Hills. The other one—when we look at something quite unique in New Zealand, when you talk to visitors who come here, when you talk to people when we go overseas—is about our incredible Māori and non-Māori relationships that we have here, and another 200 ethnicities as well. This is actually about Māori development also. So the two reflections here are on the regeneration of Christchurch—the rebuild; and particularly within the Port Hills—and the other part is around Māori development.

First of all, when we look at the Port Hills, in 2011, and even before that, in September 2010—and then came the earthquakes with thousands, tens of thousands, of aftershocks. That was the first part, the first crisis. The second one was indeed the Port Hills fires back in February. We are people who have actually been through a number of crises, and it has been this Government that has assisted us. So when we look at the funding, the key changes for the 2016-2017 estimates, we see in this bill that $4.75 million has been given to respond to, and cover costs associated with, the Port Hills fires. This funding does not actually also include the additional immediate response funding that the Government made immediately available. That was through the New Zealand Defence Force personnel and equipment, so we need to take that into account as well.

In the Port Hills, as I said, we are familiar with crises, but this Government has been adept, actually, in managing crises for us down in the South Island, particularly in the Port Hills and in Christchurch—Canterbury. We have seen it not only in Christchurch but in the Government’s response to the Kaikōura earthquakes. We have also seen the Government’s responses to the floods in Edgecumbe. This supplementary estimates bill also includes some more funding back in Christchurch specifically. Our electorate was the worst affected by landslide hazards, the Canterbury earthquakes inclusive, and, as a result of that, Land Information New Zealand, in tandem with the Christchurch City Council, has been doing a fantastic job in remediating those kinds of hazards that we find within the hills. The supplementary estimates for Vote Lands have put aside another $3.5 million to assist the Christchurch City Council’s response to the Port Hills landslide hazards, and that is just another part of this amazing Budget. This is another part of the 9 fantastic years that this Government has actually been on this side of the House—

Carmel Sepuloni: 9 long years.

NUK KORAKO: No, 9 fantastic years—9 fantastic years—and it is all about the economy.

Looking at this—because when we look at this, let us look at some of the other things that this Budget has covered in part of the Christchurch rebuild. In the Port Hills we have big users of public transport, so we have benefited greatly with a $53 million investment in the Christchurch Bus Interchange. I was proud to see the opening of the Margaret Mahy Family Playground and to hear the praise of local Port Hills people in association with that. Work is continuing also on the sixth precinct within Christchurch. That is the Justice and Emergency Services Precinct, which is about to be completed in the next 2 months. There is the Avon River Precinct, there are the health hubs, there are the performing arts, and there is the retail and innovation.

All this has been possible because of a Government, a Prime Minister, and a Minister of Finance who take responsible approaches to managing New Zealand’s finance. This is another reflection of the 9 fantastic years that New Zealand has enjoyed under a National Government.

The next part of this—let us have a look at the Māori economy. Let us have a look at Māori development within this particular Budget. Budget 2017 includes $93 million in new Māori development initiatives, under He Kai Kei Aku Ringa, the Government’s Māori economic development programme. That is the first thing. The next one is that included in this funding is an extra $10 million to support development in the Māori tourism sector—a huge, important sector, particularly within the Māori economy. On top of that, let us come to housing. There has been this thing where the glass is always half empty on that side of the House about housing, but when we look at this initiative from this Budget, there is $17 million—$17 million—for Māori housing initiatives. That is what this is about. We also have to look at Whānau Ora—Whānau Ora, let us have a look at that. We gave an extra 2,500 whānau access to Whānau Ora. We have $10 million—here is another one—to support and sustain marae around the country, $10 million. Another $8 million to extend the Rangatahi Suicide Prevention Fund.

Kelvin Davis: But there’s no details.

Meka Whaitiri: Ha, ha!

NUK KORAKO: That is not funny. That is not funny. It is actually about our people—rangatahi suicide, that is what it is about. And another $4 million for the Passport to Life programmes.

When we look at all of this, from the Christchurch rebuild to Māori development, all of this is because of the 9 fantastic years that all New Zealanders have enjoyed under this Government, and, particularly, it is about the economy. That makes that money available for all this incredible development that we have had. I have no hesitation in recommending this bill to the House. E mihi atu ki a koutou katoa, kia ora.

Bills

Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill

Third Reading

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Statistics) on behalf of the Minister of Finance: I move, That the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill be now read a third time.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Appropriation (2016/17 Supplementary Estimates) Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 62

New Zealand National 58; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Noes 57

New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill

Third Reading

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (Minister of Statistics) on behalf of the Minister of Finance: I move, That the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be now read a third time.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Imprest Supply (First for 2017/18) Bill be read a third time.

Ayes 62

New Zealand National 58; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Noes 57

New Zealand Labour 31; Green Party 14; New Zealand First 12.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

Third Reading

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Energy and Resources): I move, That the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. This bill is an important part of the Government’s work to improve the efficiency of our energy use and to meet our climate change commitments. We need a shift in focus to reduce our emissions and improve our energy productivity. Transport, energy, and process heat are key areas where gains can be made. This bill makes small but significant changes that will assist the Government and New Zealand to make that shift in focus.

Much of the energy our industries use to create heat for processing is non-renewable. Process heat makes up one-third of New Zealand’s overall energy use and contributes 9 percent of gross emissions. Sixty percent of process heat is supplied using non-renewable fuels, mainly coal and gas. The industrial sector is the largest end-user of process heat; 80 percent of total process heat occurs in this sector. There are opportunities for some businesses to switch to more efficient non-renewable sources of energy, like gas, or to improve the efficiency of the energy that is currently used. I today released a replacement New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, which includes process heat as a priority area as well as an action to develop a plan to unlock the energy efficiency in renewables potential in this sector.

Another priority area in that strategy is transport. Greenhouse gas emissions for the transport sector make up about 20 percent of New Zealand’s total emissions, and over 40 percent of New Zealand’s emissions from the energy sector. With 99 percent of transport energy coming from non-renewable sources, there is a huge opportunity to reduce emissions in the sector. The high amount of electricity that is generated in New Zealand from renewable energy sources such as hydro, geothermal, and wind means that electric vehicles (EVs) provide an excellent way to make the most of this opportunity to reduce emissions. EVs can leverage greater value from New Zealand’s renewable energy and electricity, of which electricity was 88 percent in the 3 months to December 2016, reducing emissions while ensuring economic growth. Last year the Government announced the Electric Vehicles Programme, a package of proposals to increase the uptake of electric vehicles. Substantial progress has been made in delivering the programme, and the number of electric vehicles on our roads has increased significantly, from around 1,300 when the programme was announced to around 3,500 now.

The bill contains two further initiatives from the programme. The bill clarifies that a road controlling authority may use its bylaw-making powers to give electric vehicles access to special vehicle lanes. While road controlling authorities wish to use this power, electric vehicles that are powered solely by electric batteries, as well as plug-in hybrid vehicles that operate on a combination of externally charged batteries and a petrol-diesel motor, will be able to use special lanes. This measure has proved a useful way to encourage the uptake of electric vehicles. I recently travelled to San Francisco, where there has been a substantial growth in EV ownership. There they have provided rebates, but also use similar measures to those we are introducing, such as access to special vehicle lanes.

The bill also encourages the uptake of electric vehicles by extending the road-user charge exemption to include heavy electric vehicles such as electric trucks and buses. The exemption already applies to light electric vehicles. This change is a transparent and efficient financial incentive to encourage heavy electric vehicles over equivalent conventional heavy vehicles. The exemption for heavy electric vehicles will be in place until they comprise 2 percent of the heavy vehicle fleet. The Government has a target of doubling the number of electric vehicles every year to reach approximately 64,000 by the end of 2021, and this bill will help to ensure continued progress towards that target.

The bill also makes some important changes to the way the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) is funded. EECA is the Crown agency tasked with encouraging, promoting, and supporting energy efficiency, conservation, and the use of renewable sources of energy. It is important that EECA can focus its activities where the gains are the greatest—for example, on transport energy and process heat. The bill does this by giving EECA access to funding from three levies: the existing electricity efficiency levy, the gas levy, and the petroleum or engine fuel monitoring levy. This will enable the cost of EECA’s levy-funded activities to be spread across these three fuels instead of being confined to electricity.

An example of the sort of work that EECA will be able to progress using this funding is the electric vehicles promotional campaign and the low-emission vehicles contestable fund. The first round of the low-emission vehicles contestable fund saw 15 projects funded, including the delivery of at least 100 new public charging stations around the country. It also saw support for an electric car - sharing scheme and electric trucks, buses, and supermarket delivery vans. These types of projects are bringing electric vehicles and charging stations into New Zealand neighbourhoods, encouraging and supporting the uptake of EVs.

The bill also makes changes to ensure that legislation is keeping up with innovative changes in the energy sector. For example, the bill clarifies how electricity industry regulation applies to secondary networks. These are electricity networks that are indirectly connected to the national grid. The changes will ensure that when owners of secondary networks undertake activities equivalent to those of an electric distributor, they should be subject to, and benefit from, the same regulatory requirements.

I want to acknowledge my colleague the Hon Simon Bridges, the previous Minister of Energy and Resources, for the work that he has put into this as well. The bill has had only minor changes through its passage. I think these have improved the bill, and I would like to specifically thank the Commerce Committee and the members of this House for their excellent consideration of, constructive engagement with, and support for this bill. I would particularly like to acknowledge the chair of the committee, Melissa Lee MP. I would also like to thank the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and Ministry of Transport officials for their very good work on this bill.

This bill will encourage energy innovation such as emerging energy technologies and will increase variation in energy-related business models, along with a significant shift in how we power our cars and trucks and buses. This will enable us, as a nation, to respond to our environmental and energy objectives. I commend this bill to the House.

Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call. Labour is supporting this piece of legislation, as we have in its various stages throughout its passage through this House and into law.

Broadly, the aim and the policy objective of this bill is to encourage energy innovation and to allow the emerging energy technologies to increase variation in energy-related business models. It also implements the Government’s electric vehicle (EV) programme, as the Minister has outlined. But is this a piece of legislation that is allowing the kind of transformational change we need in order to meet our climate change obligations and to do the transition to a low-carbon or net zero carbon economy, which New Zealand needs to be on a pathway to doing? No, it is not. It is a very low-ambition piece of legislation. It makes some changes that we support—because why would you not—but does it go far enough, and does it set out the kind of transformational change agenda that we need in this country as we are getting through the 21st century?

The Minister has identified that process heat and transport are two very critical areas in which we must address our greenhouse gas emissions and where we simply must cut our carbon dioxide emissions. While this bill does address one of those areas in terms of the EVs, and it makes some changes around that, there has been modelling done that shows that what will actually happen as a result of this legislation is pretty much what would have happened without it. This is standing-still legislation. It is not putting in place the kind of transformational change that will see the uptake of EVs happen faster because the Government is getting in behind it, because it knows it simply has to in order to meet its climate change objectives and because this is actually what the 21st century is going to look like.

One of the other important things that this legislation does is amend the Electricity Act 2010 and the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Act of 1989 to allow the Government, through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), to focus levy funding on the areas where the greatest impacts can be made. The Minister said that it is in this area of transportation and industrial process heat that the Government sees that the greatest gains can be made, but this is an “or” for this Government, because in order to do this, some areas where we could make some really good gains in terms of our energy efficiency as a country, and where we could address the amount of energy we use and the efficiency with which we use it, along with the great co-benefit of addressing energy poverty, is being cut to make way for this scheme. So whereas EECA was once the champion and the agency through which we did some very fine work in terms of insulating our houses, that scheme is being cut and the focus is moving.

We have over 600,000 homes in this country that are still not adequately insulated. That is over half a million houses, and well over half a million families and people who are living in houses that simply are not warm and dry enough, and we know what the impact of that can be. So while I think that it is good that we can see that EECA is turning its attention to industrial heat and to the issues of electric vehicles, we simply cannot lose sight of some of the other core objectives that it should be performing. That is why Labour has said that in Government not only we will not stop the subsidies but we will not deny homeowners access to the subsidy, as this current Government has done, because we recognise that there are a lot of hard-working New Zealanders who struggle to buy their first house, and it is not particularly well insulated, but they are simply not eligible. This Government does not think that they are worthy of having any assistance from the Government, and we think we can both help families and also address the issue of how it is, in a transition to a low-carbon economy, we are going to have to make the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy.

Not only do we need to increase the proportion of renewables that we use within our economy but we also need to dramatically increase the capacity of our renewable generation as we make that transition, because as we transition cars away from petrol and on to electricity, we are simply going to need to consume more electricity. If the industrial processes of electricity are one of the solutions to transferring that industrial heat from a fossil fuel to a renewable future, then we simply will need to increase the generation quite markedly. That is something that the Vivid Economics report did some really good scenario planning around—about what that future can look like.

So I am a bit disappointed, because I actually think this is really exciting change. This transition is such an opportunity for New Zealand. If we do this properly and if we put this in place, it will actually be an economic transformation on the scale of the Industrial Revolution that the world will be looking at as we make these changes. But, instead, what we have is a low-ambition Government that just does not get it. It does not get what the opportunity is there, it does not get what the future can hold, and it certainly has not come out with the kind of fresh thinking and the fresh ideas that we need to take us further into the 21st century, when we, as a country, have to grapple with these things.

The most vexing thing in this legislation was how it was we were going to identify electric vehicles in the bus lanes. That was the most vexing issue we could find in this legislation. Where are the big ideas, where is the vision, and where is that thinking? The Commerce Committee did spend a reasonable amount of time trying to work out whether a coloured number plate or a sticker on the car was the best way to have the observation of whether or not a car belonged in the bus lane. That is an important issue, and we need to be able to police that issue, but it certainly is not the biggest issue. When we think about modernising our energy sector to face the future, that should not be the biggest issue that we spend our time on. What we have seen is that we are saying that local authorities have the power to allow electric vehicles to travel in high-occupancy lanes. This is not a long-term solution, because, as we see the uptake of EVs at the rate that I hope we see, simply allowing those vehicles to go into the lanes that are meant to reduce congestion will only add to it. So, again, we have a Government that is just looking at band-aid solutions and not thinking about what the big-picture answers need to be to some of these problems.

The other thing that this legislation does, and it is an important change that this legislation makes, is it amends the Electricity Industry Act of 2010 to clarify how the electricity industry legislation applies to a secondary network. This is a really big, growing business model in this sector. One of the things that it sets out to do is understand what it means when owners of secondary networks undertake activities equivalent to those of an established electricity distributor. They should be subject to the same regulatory requirements. This is an area where technology is changing all the time. The way in which we distribute electricity and the way in which that is done is constantly on the move, and it is an area where we have to have legislation that can keep up with that technological change. The days of just transmitting power down the power lines and it arriving at a house or a business and being utilised—that is changing at such speed, so it is really important that we ensure (a) that we have got the right regulations, and (b) that we have a legislative framework that can meet those requirements as the change occurs.

Labour is supporting this bill. We do not think that it is ambitious enough. It does not have the fresh kind of thinking that we need in this very important area for our economy as we enter further into the 21st century. There is so much opportunity for New Zealand. We have a real strategic advantage in this new world in the amount of renewable energy we have access to at a low cost, and this is a Government that cannot imagine a future where that opportunity is maximised.

MELISSA LEE (National): I hope Dr Woods is actually feeling a little bit better than she was before.

Dr Megan Woods: So do I.

MELISSA LEE: You were coughing, and I was a bit concerned about you. I have to say that was a pretty good effort, considering, but in that 10 minutes I am not so sure whether I actually heard any solutions that she was actually talking about—but good effort.

It is a great opportunity to take a call on the third reading of the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I would like to pay tribute to the important work the Hon Simon Bridges, Minister of Transport, and the Hon Judith Collins, Minister of Energy and Resources, have done towards this important bill, which will support the greater uptake of innovative, new electric vehicles around New Zealand. Thank you also to my parliamentary colleagues across the House who have worked very diligently to bring this bill back to the House. While it was before the Commerce Committee, I have to also say, we worked very well together, and I would like to thank the secretariat and the advisers who have guided us through the process.

The Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill is actually an omnibus bill that will amend several Acts of Parliament to encourage energy innovation and the uptake of new energy technologies, support all New Zealand families and businesses to embrace 21st century technology, and support New Zealand in responding to its environmental and energy objectives. While this bill was before the Commerce Committee we had 40 written and 11 oral submissions on the merits of the legislation, with submitters including Auckland Transport, the Electricity Retailers’ Association of New Zealand, and the Motor Industry Association, and I thank those organisations for their advice and their careful consideration.

The committee proposed a number of changes to the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill to better ensure its purpose. These included clarifying the definition of “secondary network provider” to better match the policy intent of the bill, which the Minister of Energy and Resources actually talked about earlier; amending the Land Transport Act to permit images taken by approved vehicle surveillance equipment to be evidence of the unauthorised use of special vehicle lanes; supporting Orders in Council to exempt road-user charges for a time when the Minister is satisfied that may encourage the uptake of heavy electric vehicles; and amending the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Act of 1989 to allow regulations to be made to provide exemptions from the gas levy and place liability for the gas levy solely where the gas is sold by the retailer.

The National Government has been a leader in ensuring New Zealand meets our international targets for climate change and protecting the environment, and in encouraging innovative new technologies and their uptake among Kiwi families and businesses. As a country, as a nation, as Kiwis we believe in the “clean, green” Kiwi image, and a key way to continue the growth of this brand is to promote the uptake of electric vehicles and develop energy efficiency across commercial sectors through practical policies that work for those businesses and Government without an undue burden on the nation.

Across the world and across New Zealand we are embracing innovation, and the uptake of new technology is one way of achieving that. Whether this is in the work of entrepreneurs out in Māhia Peninsula with Rocket Lab, or the work of local Kiwis buying a top-end Tesla or family-style Nissan Leaf, we are still a country that continues to be at the forefront of embracing new ideas and new opportunities, and supporting new aspirations not just of this generation but of the ones to come, as well. New Zealand will always be a great, environmentally friendly country, and a country friendly to business. The Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill will help continue to support our way of doing things.

Talking about our way of doing things, I have to actually say that the secret to our America’s Cup win apparently was a surfboard maker. I think this kind of innovation that Kiwis are so good at is in this, as well. I hope that more people will take up energy-efficient electric vehicles, and I hope that people are encouraged by this legislation to do so. It is a good bill, and I commend it to the House.

STUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I would like to respond to a couple of comments that the honourable member Melissa Lee has just made. First of all, she said that this bill is responding to the Government’s commitments, and it is just not so. As my colleague Megan Woods said, it is a good bill. We support the bill, but it just does not go far enough. There is nothing aspirational or visionary about it. I know that the member Chris Bishop said that Labour seems to be captured by vision, or that we talk about aspiration too much. This is one area that I have a real passion for, because I think this can play into our global brand on such a big scale and in a way that adds value not just to our country or our brand but to our whole sector and the way people view us.

Let me give you an example of that. Simon Bridges, who has talked about the electric vehicle policy, I must admit, for quite a long time now—I remember when he went to cut the ribbon. I think it was for the 1,000th electric vehicle to be registered on New Zealand roads. He turns up in this huge big diesel BMW. He gets out, cuts the ribbon for the electric vehicle, smiles for the camera, has a couple of words, and then he jumps back into this huge big diesel BMW and drives back to Parliament. To me there is a—

Meka Whaitiri: Irony?

STUART NASH: It is just wrong. There is an irony. I was going to say “hypocrisy”, but there is an irony in that. The thing is that when we want to make these sorts of changes, it is often that the Government has to lead the way. A lot of press releases and a lot of commentary to do with this bill talk about the fact that the Government has to work with the private sector to make this happen, and I could not agree more. But often what has to happen is the Government has to take the first step to give the private sector the confidence to actually invest.

Let me give you an example. My understanding is that there are around about 17,000 vehicles in the wider Government fleet, and let us make an assumption that they are all on 3 by 1-year leases—that assumption will not be correct, but it is just easy for mathematics. Let us say that 15,000 of those can be converted to electric vehicles (EVs). After 8 years you have got about 40,000 vehicles on the road, simply because the Government made a decision to convert to electric vehicles. There are a whole lot of assumptions amongst that, but I suppose the point I am making is that if the Government led the way in this—if the Government was really serious about driving a change towards electric vehicles—then the first thing it would do is convert the Crown fleet.

Imagine if we picked up dignitaries in a Tesla. Imagine turning up at the airport—CR1 is a big Tesla, and it is an electric vehicle. That would send a very, very clear message. I have got a friend who knows Elon Musk quite well, actually. I mentioned this to him, and he said that, knowing Elon and the fact that he is a fantastic self-promoter, if the New Zealand Government went to Tesla and said it wanted to convert the whole Crown fleet to Teslas, Elon Musk would probably go: “Absolutely. Tell me where you want them and when you want them, and let’s put them in.” It would not only look good for us, it would look good for Tesla.

The thing that, I suppose, disappoints me about this is that we go to the world with a brand—we go to the world with a brand that says “clean, green”, “100% Pure”. The interesting thing is that this brand started out as a tourism brand, and it was so successful that it sort of morphed into our national brand. In 2005 the then Ministry of Economic Development tried to place a value on this brand. It is very difficult to value a brand, but they came up with a figure—this was 12 years ago. They came up with the figure that the “clean, green”, “100% Pure” brand was worth about $20 billion a year to our country.

At the same time, a group—I think it was Deloitte—came out with another survey that said 80 percent of companies, when they are exporting products overseas, leverage off that clean, green, pure brand. When Melissa says that we are an environmentally friendly country, well, our brand says that—that is how we go to the world—but it is actually not the reality. You know, 60 percent of our rivers are unswimmable at some point in time.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Back to the bill.

STUART NASH: No, Mr Assistant Speaker, this is about energy efficiency—[Interruption]

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): This is about—back to the bill.

Hon Member: Do as you’re told.

STUART NASH: Who said that? The arrogance—9 years of arrogance, and you end up with that. But anyway, what I am talking about is—we are talking about energy innovation. Energy and innovation—it is what drives this country. It is about where we see ourselves. It is about how we sell ourselves to the world, and we are just not doing it well.

I am a huge fan of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), and this allows EECA to actually derive its fees, to drive energy efficiency, from not just the electricity sector, which it can at the moment, but from the gas and petroleum sector as well. That is a good thing. But when I hear Government members stand up and say “Isn’t it wonderful. We’ve insulated all these houses, and we now live in a much better world.”—well, we do to a certain extent, but 50,000 New Zealand kids are admitted to hospital every single year with respiratory disease. That is a disease of poverty, so let us not pat ourselves on the back until that 50,000 figure gets down to zero. That is aspirational. I know Chris Bishop does not like aspiration, but that is aspirational.

There is one thing I would like to talk about in this bill, and this has sort of been overlooked. That is the fact that we have changed the way that the gas levy is going to be collected. In the past, the collection of the gas levy sat at the wholesale selling point, and what we heard from the officials was that this was woefully inefficient and quite complex, to the point that the levy just was not being collected. There was never any suggestion of any form of illegal activity, fraud, or anything like that; it was just so complex that it just was not being collected. What we decided—or what the officials decided, and we teased this through and we agreed—is that, in fact, we would change it so that the gas levy would be collected by the retailers as opposed to the wholesalers.

This makes sense. I understand this, but the one concern I do have—and I have brought this up a couple of times when speaking about this bill—is that we are all aware that if Parliament decides there is going to be a levy placed in a certain point in the supply chain, often retailers or wholesalers or whatever businesses are involved use that as an excuse to put up the bill or to charge more. What we do not want to see, and what we have specifically put in the report for this bill—we will monitor the way in which this levy is implemented, to ensure that consumers are not unduly or unfairly charged. What we actually heard from the officials is that the amount that this levy represents to each consumer is just an infinitesimal amount—barely a cent. The last thing we want to see—and I suppose the committee is putting the retail sector on notice—on any consumer’s gas bill, especially in the middle of winter, is an increased charge because Parliament has decided that this is the point in the supply chain at which the levy will be collected. We just want to put it out there—we do not want to see any increase in the gas bill because of what Parliament has done here.

Let me get back to electric cars and energy efficiency. What Mr Bridges has said is that we want to double the number of EVs to 64,000 by 2021. If the way we are going to do that is simply by allowing electric vehicles to drive in bus lanes, well, I do not think that is good enough. I would love to see 64,000 electric vehicles in New Zealand by 2021. It is an aspirational target—I hope he did not check with Mr Bishop, because he would not have liked that. We have just got to be—when I say “we”, I mean a Government, so I suppose it is going to come down to us in a couple of months—has got to be more proactive in the way it does this. I must admit, in this area I am actually not for subsidies. I do not think we should subsidise electric vehicles, because I think all that does is—it has the potential impact to distort the market, much to the market’s overall detriment, certainly in the long term.

But as mentioned, what we can do is—Governments can influence behaviour or influence outcomes by their own behaviour. What I think we have said—and I do not think I am releasing any policy now, because I think it has been out there—is we would actually convert the Government fleet to electric vehicles, or the majority of them, because that is about walking the walk. I think that what happens is the general public tends to respond and take us, as politicians, seriously when we say “This is what we would like to see in the country.”, and then we go and do it. Too often, what happens—and this bill is a classic case—is we say: “This is what we would like to see—64,000 electric vehicles; fantastic.” Then, quite rightly so, people ask what we are doing about this. Well, nothing—we are just driving these big German diesel BMWs. It is the wrong signal.

We are supporting this bill. Labour does support anything that drives energy efficiency. We are supporting anything that drives energy innovation. We just think that this bill could have gone a whole lot further. It actually could have been innovative, it could have led the way, and it could have, once again, put us at the forefront of global leadership in this space, but it fails yet again. We need fresh ideas in this space.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): What a great bill the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill is, which is in the forefront of the development in this space, which is world-leading, which is innovative. Indeed, it is so emphatically so that not only is National, obviously, supporting it but Labour is supporting it too, which I think is fantastic. I want to acknowledge Judith Collins as now the responsible Minister, obviously Simon Bridges before her, and Melissa Lee and the whole Commerce Committee that worked on this; I myself am pleased to be part of that committee.

This bill has four main elements to it. We have heard a little bit from the last speaker, Stuart Nash, about the changes to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA). First and foremost, the levies for EECA will no longer be solely from electricity but actually on the lines of gas as well, and fuels, which will also broaden the mandate of EECA, which I think is fantastic. A lot of talk has often come around how electric vehicles will now be able to access special vehicle lanes. Importantly, we are not mandating, as Parliament, that that must happen, but we are allowing individual councils to make their decisions in that regard. The third element is exemptions to road charges. We are very keen to make sure that electric vehicles, particularly the larger ones in the fleet—trucks, effectively—will not have to pay road-user charges (RUCs). I suppose within all—well, particularly those two elements around RUCs and around special vehicle lands, it is an incentive to the public.

The last speaker spoke a lot about what the Government can do, and I am sure we can continue to explore options, but this is about empowering New Zealanders to make a variety of decisions in this space, and I think that is remarkably positive.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to support this bill, but I wish there was some independent Office of Parliament we could go to to actually double-check the names of pieces of legislation before they are passed tonight. The last thing we should be calling this bill is an energy innovation bill, because there is not really much innovation in it. There is no innovative thinking.

Look, we support it because all this bill does is move around some Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority levies, it allows electric vehicles in bus lanes—which experts have actually told us could, in fact, be counter-productive where it happens—and then that is pretty much it. It deals with secondary networks for apartment buildings, for example. But when you look around the world at all the real innovation that is happening in energy, you would not call this bill an energy innovation bill if you knew what was happening around the world, or knew of the potential for New Zealand. Recently, we heard there was $3.6 billion in missed energy efficiency and conservation opportunities facing the country.

So if we wanted to talk about the real innovative energy sector, there is a lot of stuff we would be talking about that is not contained in this legislation. I wish it could have a more accurate title.

I guess you can see it in Minister Judith Collins’ energy strategy, which has just come out today, which is meant to chart our energy efficiency work for the next decade. You know, it is a big deal. So what did we see? We saw three things—only three things—in this big, multi-year strategy. The first is a 1 percent process heat intensity reduction—1 percent. It sounds pretty good, right? But when you look at the data, that is what we have achieved since 1990. That is like me saying to you: “I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to go on a diet, but I am going to do exactly the same thing I have done for the last couple of decades.” That is not an ambitious target. That is like a pole-vaulter setting the pole down at about a foot and saying: “I am going to get to the Olympics if I can do this.”

Then we saw the energy intensity target that was in the previous strategy dropped entirely. I think I know why. I think it was dropped entirely because, under the current Government, we have dismally missed the target. In fact, we are seventh-worst in the entire developed world for energy intensity as a percentage of the economy. That is a big deal, because what that means is that all of us as individuals, all of us as families, and all of our businesses are paying more for one unit of economic output than the vast majority of other equivalent OECD countries are.

So, again, we have an un-innovative energy innovation bill and an un-innovative, unambitious, business-as-usual energy strategy being released today. I think anyone watching the parliamentary broadcast tonight will see a lot of politicians criticising other parties’ policies or inaction, but what they want to see, though, is other parties’ solutions, and that is what I would like to lay out with the bulk of my time.

If we wanted to have a conversation about what an innovative energy bill would look like, I suspect it might look a little bit like the energy policy the Green Party released recently. We did not just sit in a room and think about it and talk to ourselves about it; we went out and actively consulted business. We worked with Business New Zealand. We were talking to electricity retailers, big and small, and to the lines companies, the generators, the new incumbents, and the entrepreneurs. We actually talked to people who are out there innovating, like Flick, and there are other different models like Vector—which is using batteries, solar panels, and peer-to-peer electricity networks, which is absolutely, fundamentally disrupting the way we have done electricity for the last hundred years—and what we found is that there is a better, smarter, cheaper way we could run an energy system in New Zealand.

Let us start with energy poverty, which this bill does not address entirely. We know that one-fifth—20 percent—of New Zealand families are classed as being in energy poverty. They are spending more than 10 percent of their weekly disposable income just to keep the lights on or keep the heating on. At the same time, we have got 40,000 trips to hospital being made by New Zealand children because they are sick as a result of their housing—40,000 trips to hospital by Kiwi kids because they are sick from our housing.

In fact, 1,600 additional deaths are attributed to our cold, damp housing in winter. That is more than the road toll. Our houses are killing more New Zealanders than the road toll.

So if we are talking about energy poverty, what I would like to propose is a winter energy payment. What we have proposed is recycling the dividends the power companies give to the Government—recycling that to households earning less than $50,000 a year. We could be helping 530,000 households next winter by smoothing out their power price spikes over winter through having a winter energy supplement, which is what they do in Canada, which is what they do in the UK, and which is what they do in some Australian states.

So that is cheaper electricity. What about cleaner electricity? This innovative legislation does nothing directly to get us towards the 90 percent renewables target. What the Green Party would like to do is actually have a little bit more ambition, acknowledge the threat of climate change, and say that we can get to 100 percent renewables in average hydrological conditions by 2030. What we have also done is publish a model from Rocky Mountain Institute researchers showing how 100 percent could look. It is affordable, it is achievable, and—I would put it to the House—eminently desirable to set that target a little bit higher.

But what about embracing new technology? What the Green Party would like to do is, at the lines network area, which is around 40 percent of a customer’s bill—these regional distribution monopolies. That is a huge area where we could see real innovation, which is missing in this legislation. We have got 29 separate lines companies across the country, in many cases reinventing the wheel and duplicating costs. Many of them have only a tiny customer base, so they do not have the scale, the expertise, or the capital to embrace new technologies. What I have proposed is that we could make it easier by using some analogies in the Local Government Act to have lines companies work together, merge where appropriate, and then have communities support it. I am not talking about forcefully amalgamating our lines companies, but about giving them better, easier options to work together to save all their customers, and the whole country, money.

The other thing is that our lines companies are very good at installing poles and wires. That is kind of how we have done electricity for a hundred years. We have got pretty good at it now. What we need to do is get better at finding the cheaper alternatives to traditional poles and wires. They are out there when you look across the world, from lithium ion batteries to energy efficiency and conservation methods, through to demand side measures. The Rocky Mountain Institute research that I mentioned we had published showed that a negawatt—using a unit of electricity less than a megawatt, which is a unit of electricity more—is 10 times cheaper than the cheapest new generation we have in New Zealand, which is our dirt cheap wind resource. We could be doing it 10 times cheaper if we encouraged people to find easier ways to use less. That could be insulation, that could be smart appliances, and that could be sending price signals so that people choose when they use electricity to save money and save the rest of the grid in carbon.

I would also put it that our lines companies could be publishing more information around where their network constraints are, so that new entrepreneurs and new businesses—the true innovators we are not really seeing in this legislation tonight—could say: “Well, we could invest in a big distribution line that is going to cost X millions of dollars here, but we’ve got a cheaper option. Can we put it to you?”. So we have proposed a comprehensive series of measures to support our distribution network to save money, save carbon, and run a smarter grid.

In terms of our electricity market, we have proposed opening it up to more transparency and sunlight, because we heard a very clear message from our smaller retailers: they do not feel we have competitive market—and, in fact, that is what the International Energy Agency said earlier this year in a comprehensive report into the state of the New Zealand electricity system. We would like to propose more transparency on what is actually happening on the hedge markets, so that all retailers can operate on a level playing field. I want to see smart new companies come in, offering their consumers better solutions to manage electricity and to save them money.

So what we have talked about is a smarter way to run the electricity system, more transparency, and fundamental reforms to our distribution networks. But if we are going to talk about energy innovation, in fact, what we are seeing by inaction is one of the least innovative things and the most detrimental things happening in our entire electricity system. That is the solar tax, on which Judith Collins has sat by, while Unison Networks, a local regional lines monopoly, is charging its customers an additional charge just for having a solar panel. It is entirely arbitrary and entirely ridiculous.

There are better ways we could deal with the pricing impacts of greater solar penetration in New Zealand. But taxing it—“taxing” is a bit of an unfair word. Having a specific solar charge is incredibly unfair. It is simply trying to hold back the solar growth that we have seen in New Zealand. I want to see our power companies compete based on the products, the services, and the price they are offering their consumers, and not competing just because they have got a monopoly position and they want to stop customers from making a specific technology choice. If we allow this to happen, it could happen to customers who insulate and who invest in efficient appliances.

What this bill is is not an energy innovation bill. What we in the Green Party have, though, is a suite of comprehensive, consultative policies that are innovative, which is a fantastic choice for the public of New Zealand, because it is important that we get cleaner, cheaper, smarter electricity. It is just around the corner. We are seeing fundamental disruption to the electricity system, but token bills like this, which are really false advertising, will not cut it.

TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First and my colleague Fletcher Tabuteau to contribute on the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We would have to agree with our colleague from the Green Party Gareth Hughes: there is no innovation in this bill. While New Zealand First will be supporting this bill, it is as close to next to nothing as you can do without doing nothing. What it does do is it combines three levies so that the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority can improve, supposedly, the operation and administration of those levies. It does not provide any other transparency over the operation and administration of those levies, and it does not change any of the rates of those levies. It merely allows them to join together into a larger pot.

With regard to encouraging the uptake of electric vehicles by extending the road-user charges exemption to include heavy electric vehicles, first of all, let us be clear for the New Zealand public that there are currently 70 vehicles in the New Zealand public fleet. I think it is worthy to note Z Energy’s submission to the Commerce Committee: “Z notes that the proposed definition of an Electric Vehicle (EV), namely ‘a motor vehicle with motive power wholly or partially derived from an external source of electricity’, departs significantly from more traditional global definitions which typically refer to the vehicles propulsion system being electric rather than focussing on the primary source of the energy.”—e.g. external source of electricity.

This little change, this diversion from what is the globally accepted definition, will affect heavy electric vehicles—those that are self-creating or partially electric, which is the Z Energy fleet it had submitted on—as it means that the opportunity of uptake for the delayed road-user charges is going to be minimal. So not only has the Government chosen to do very little with regard to innovation, it has very, very much limited the capacity of those currently inside the fleet to actually take any advantage of this lower road-user charge.

If we look at the suggestion that the answer to incentivising New Zealanders to pick up electric vehicles is by allowing them to drive in a bus lane, firstly, let us be clear: the bill does not do that. The bill allows a local transport authority to decide whether people in an electric vehicle can use a bus lane, and the Commerce Committee recognised—there was quite a major conversation on this—that it would be difficult to identify the type of vehicle. How would they identify an electric vehicle over a non-electric vehicle travelling in the bus lane? Before any local transport authority is going to allow an electric vehicle to travel in a bus lane—and Auckland has already said it is highly unlikely—it is going to have to install some sort of photography system so that it can check whether the people currently travelling, or who would possibly use that access, are actually electric vehicles. It is going to have to take photos of them, and it is then going to have to go through the motor vehicle registration files to see whether they are actually electric vehicles or not.

Can I just read that right now—actually, it is not right now; it was in December 2016—Norway, which has a population of 5.2 million people, which is a million more than us at the moment, hit 100,000 electric vehicles on its roads. But it did it with several different ways of incentivising. If I can read from the submission by ChargeNet NZ: “The nation of Norway allowed Electric Vehicles into high occupancy vehicle lanes. This was part of a policy package that included significant tax breaks at point of purchase for new Electric Vehicles. Norwegian policy should be considered at a city level … a national level (where Electric Vehicles were seen as critical to meet the nations carbon reduction goals in a petroleum focused economy, and a clear fiscal case was presented as part of this policy development that allowed the policy to be considered as part of an offset of Emission Trading Scheme costs), and a regional level (where European Union policy in regards to carbon, and Norway’s bilateral trade agreements with for example Germany … should be considered). It should also be noted that Norway is now politically struggling to phase out the high occupancy vehicle lane incentive, which has become a congestion issue.”

So it is as close to nothing as this Government could get to incentivise the uptake of domestic electric vehicles. It will have to be phased out within a 5-year period. I note that there were amendments by the select committee. It suggested, as the commentary on the bill states, an amendment to the Road User Charges Act: “We also recommend inserting new subsection (2A) to provide that the initial RUC exemption would expire no later than 31 December 2025,”—which is 8 years away—“and any subsequent exemption would last for no more than 5 years.” So that is a total of 13 years away, and yet if we look at the Government’s own statistics, we see that in May 2016 we had 1,394 electric vehicles registered and in May 2017 we had 3,576 electric vehicles registered. What this Government has put inside this bill, supposedly to incentivise electric vehicles, will need to be undone—if any local authority actually puts it in place in the first instance—because of downstream congestion.

What might have been smarter—and I have got to say I am disappointed by the submissions by Z Energy and by other organisations in that they did not push harder for this Government to actually incentivise charging stations. Distance anxiety is one of the largest blockages to New Zealand citizens actually picking up and taking on board a second-hand electric vehicle. They worry that they will not be able to get to the next charging station before they run out of juice, as such. But this Government went nowhere near that.

Just imagine if every Z station in the North Island had a super-charging station inside it. Imagine the distance that you could get to. Right now Northland is fairly covered—and thank you, Northpower, which I forgot in my previous contribution. But if you go past the Brynderwyns and you keep on going and head south, if you are trying to get from Auckland down to Tauranga you have got an enormous gap in there. You actually need to go to a caravan park, book into a park there, and see whether you can somehow run an extension cord.

This Government had an opportunity. It would not have cost it money, necessarily, but it would have cost it some time to think about how it could have created a greater electric vehicle incentive plan for this country. That would have gone a long way to our commitment to the Paris Agreement and to our carbon-neutral footprint.

This bill is an opportunity missed. We will support it because it does no harm. It amalgamates some levies, and away we go. But let us be clear: there is no innovation inside this bill. There is no vision here and there is no aspiration. New Zealand First, I think we are, what, 86 days away from having a Government that just might have some aspiration with regard to shifting the petrol-driven fleet, the diesel-driven fleet, that we currently have into something that is fit for purpose for the future. Kia ora.

BRETT HUDSON (National): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It is quite incredible: speeches in general pieces of legislation often go to show the fundamental philosophies that parties in a Government or potential Government have. The previous speaker from New Zealand First, Tracey Martin, pointed out—she has just been talking about special vehicle lanes—the highly centralised, top-down, authoritarian control model of a New Zealand First Government, or a Government New Zealand First might be a party in. Instead of celebrating and supporting giving choice about the use of special vehicle lanes by electric vehicles to the local roading authorities, which were either the councils for local roads or the New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA) for highways—instead of giving them the choice to make a decision for what is relevant for a given town or a given stretch of highway—no; the answer over there is to get Government to have a blanket rule, presumably for everyone to do what it wants.

Well, I celebrate the idea that we are saying “Let us do some things, make some incremental changes, and offer some incentives that will help to shift some of the fleet away from non-renewable energy—fossil fuels—to electric vehicles, and, in this particular case, heavy vehicles.” We have already done work on light passenger vehicles. It is the incentives that can help people to make that decision to switch to these sorts of vehicles, giving them a bit of an exemption for a period of time on road-user charges, which are a real charge for them, and also giving them the potential use of special vehicle lanes.

But if we are going to permit special vehicle lanes, then I agree wholly that it should be the local authorities that get to make that decision. For example, just here in Wellington, most of the bus lanes—those special vehicle lanes in Wellington—are already permitted to be used by buses, obviously, but also by taxis, cyclists, and motorcyclists, except for a couple and they are restricted to bus only. If you had central government going to set out an edict for the use of these lanes across the country, what is the chance that it will catch those particular instances around the country? I would say zero.

The best way of making sure that you can potentially open this lane usage in a way that makes sense is to let the local authorities make that decision and apply it as best for their localities. The reality is that it is a small incentive. Having lived in Wellington for many years, with very narrow, windy roads, let me assure the House that if there were an incentive to be able to use a special vehicle lane, I would consider that, as a road user here, a very real incentive. Having been stuck in places like Glenmore Street just up the road here in rush-hour traffic, I would welcome the ability to be able to use a bus lane and would see that as an advantage of choosing that sort of a vehicle.

This bill also does some work around the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority levy, which will make sense about broadening the potential uses of the levy that is collected, all with the idea, of course, of helping to reduce emissions and promote energy efficiency. It is a bill that is meant and intended to give only incremental improvements, but those incremental improvements will provide small reasons for people to look to shift their vehicle usage—in this instance, particularly around heavy vehicles and domestic light vehicles, as I previously noted. It is a very sensible, pragmatic way forward, and I commend the bill to the House.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): Well, it is great to know that Brett Hudson has got the resources—sorry; this is so bizarre—to swap out and buy a brand-new car for $20,000 to $30,000, because he thinks that he will now be able to use a bus lane. It is ridiculous if National thinks that being able to use a bus lane with your car is going to drive people to sell off their current cheapies and buy a brand-new electric vehicle just so they can drive in a bus lane. Is that seriously how National thinks people operate in this country? That is the craziest thing that I have heard in a long time from someone in National, and I have to listen to you guys every day, so, you know, it is quite out there.

We will support the bill, because it is this tiny little step forward. It is the most minuscule little step that National could possibly make in trying to encourage people into electric vehicles. There are so many other things that it could be doing that make it actually reasonable and feasible for people to be able to make the shift. One of the great things that it could be doing, as the Government, is shifting its own fleet to be able to help build the second-hand market in electric cars in this country. That is one of the things, right? Lots of people would really, really love to have an electric car and really do understand that in the long term for them there are savings both to their own pockets and their families’ pockets but also to the environment and the climate, and they want to make that shift. But these cars, at the moment, for most people, are pretty expensive.

So let us make sure, let us do what we can, to build a second-hand market in these cars. The fact is that one of the best ways to do that is to find encouragement for companies to change their fleet. It is those big companies—the Government included, as a large organisation—local governments, and other big companies that we need to shift their fleet into electric vehicles that will help to build the second-hand market, and it is just one of those useful things to do. It helps to reduce climate pollution. It helps to improve the state of vehicles in New Zealand, and it makes more and more electric vehicles more available to ordinary families who really would like to make the shift. It is these kinds of things, amongst others, that are actually being driven not by National, with its silly little bill, but by other organisations and communities.

I want to do a shout-out, actually, to all of those communities in New Zealand that have worked really hard to improve and increase the amount of solar on the roofs of their communities. Where I live in Dunedin, in Waitītī, in this little community down there, there has been a huge uptake in solar panels, for example. The school has got solar panels on it. It was supported by a community trust for that to happen. Some of the businesses that run out of Waitītī have been doing that as well. There are normal households that are trying to do that, because they know that they can help save money for themselves and also improve their environment and climate. There are people there who have got little single-dwelling windmills, wind turbines—just little ones—for their own use. There is a community trust there that is trying to build a community wind turbine for that community, as well. There is even a guy—this great guy—who takes second-hand petrol cars, turns them into electric vehicles, and makes them available at a reasonable price to people in the community. Yes. It is amazing. It is amazing what people will do when they work together because they believe in saving money in the short and long term and saving the climate and our environment.

It is that kind of innovation that we want a Government to be supporting. It is communities like that that are leading the way on what can be done to improve access to electric vehicles—in this case, second-hand ones—to make it possible for people to really be able to make the shift. Communities are leading the way in this country with the shift to clean, renewable energy and technologies, and then National members—with all the resources of Government that they have available to them—instead give us this tiny little bill that lets electric cars drive in the bus lane.

It is a disgrace. They are gone in 80-something days, eh? They are gone in 80-something days, and New Zealanders can rest assured that the new and progressive Government of which the Greens will be a part will make sure that there are genuine incentives and opportunities for this country to make that change to a genuinely renewable, sustainable technology that will save families money in their back pockets and save the climate at the same time—win-win. Thank you.

SUE MORONEY (Labour): I too look forward to having a change to a Government that will actually do something innovative in this space and will actually commit to improving the uptake of electric vehicles in New Zealand, so that we can honour the commitments that our Government has given—which this side of the House fully intends to honour properly—about reducing pollution, reducing greenhouse gases, and reducing carbon emissions.

Sadly, this bill is not the thing that will actually address those very important issues. It is the most woefully inadequate piece of window dressing I have seen for quite some time, and that is saying something, because that Government is fond of bringing window dressing pieces of legislation before this House all of the time. We know that the Minister of Transport specialises in photo opportunities with electric vehicles, and this is really the legislative version of a photo opportunity with an electric vehicle. It purports to do something and then it does not actually do it.

We know that this Government has a woefully inadequate target of having 64,000 electric vehicles in the New Zealand fleet by 2021. It calls it ambitious. Well, what Treasury said about it was that, actually, if the Government did nothing, there would likely be more than 64,000 electric vehicles in this country by 2021 anyway. That is how uninspiring its target is. It is only 2 percent of the vehicle fleet by 2021. How aspirational is that? Not very. So it is no surprise, really, that this Government comes up with this type of measure.

I want to talk about the bus-lane initiative, because it is daft idea, actually. I am certain that the way the Government has drafted this bill, no territorial local authority will, in fact, make a decision to go down this path. No local authority with any sense will go down this path, because if it is a local authority like Auckland, say, and it has got congestion issues already—that is why it has bus lanes—why would it clog them up with other vehicles that are not about public transport and are not about sharing vehicles? Why would Auckland do that? The answer is that, almost certainly, Auckland is not going to do that. So where is this initiative going to be used? Which is the local authority that does not have a congestion problem but has bus lanes, or T3 or T2 lanes, and actually wants to spend ratepayers’ money trying to find out whether the vehicles in those lanes are electric vehicles or not? That is what this bill actually asks them to do. It says that if the local authorities want to take advantage of this poorly thought-out piece of policy, they are going to have to pay for the enforcement of it. No local authority is going to do that.

So the one thing, the one bad idea that this Government has come up with in order to try to make it look like it is interested in electric vehicles, is actually not going to be put in place anywhere. That is the reason why Labour is prepared to support this legislation, because, while it does not do anything, I think Tracey Martin is right: it does not do any harm. It could have done harm with that particular proposal, but I know, and I think everyone in this House knows, that no local authority is actually going to implement it, because it has been drafted so poorly.

It is very clear that this Government has no intention of making that innovative move to electric vehicles. How do we know this? We know this because between April and December 2016—so the Government makes this grand announcement in April about its new policy to increase electric vehicles. By December 2016, out of 2,039 vehicles purchased by that Government’s own procurement panel, how many of them were electric vehicles?

Hon Ruth Dyson: How many?

SUE MORONEY: Just eight. Just eight out of 2,039—and there is the proof of the pudding that that Government has no intention of actually doing the right thing to meet our climate change commitments and actually increase electric vehicles, therefore managing down our reliance on fossil fuels. This Government has just produced a piece of legislation that is the equivalent of a photo opportunity with an electric vehicle.

KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National): Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and participate and support this bill. First of all, I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate Emirates Team New Zealand on winning the America’s Cup. That was a proud moment for every Kiwi.

This bill gives a lot of options to enhance how we can improve on the technology. Tracey Martin touched upon the fact that the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) has got a limited scope, but this will give it the opportunity to ensure that there is more innovation in this area. EECA is a Crown entity responsible for encouraging, promoting, and supporting energy efficiency, energy conservation, and the use of renewable resources of energy. Under EECA’s current funding model, its entire levy funding is recovered from the electricity efficiency levy, which can be spent only on electricity efficiency activities. This bill will enable the cost of EECA’s activity to stretch across the levies of transport, fuel, and gas, as well as electricity. That will help to bring more innovation and more activities, so that EECA can spread its wings.

The previous speaker from the Labour Party, Sue Moroney, mentioned that local bodies will not implement that change in the using of bus lanes, because they feel that there is already congestion. But the fact is that the Government is giving an option to local bodies to ensure and feel what is for their best advantage. We do not want the Government in the centre to implement the policies and tell them what is best for them to do. They should decide which things are best for them, and they will implement those things accordingly. I think the points being raised by Sue Moroney were totally contradictory and did not have any logic to them. I think we should give authority to local bodies to ensure they can implement the policies in the way they feel is best for their local areas.

I would also like to mention that new emerging technologies are on offer, where we can have more efficient ways where we can save energy. These economical ways are the way to go forward. This bill will help to invite more innovation into New Zealand, and having electric cars is one of those. For example, the heat process in the dairy industry creates a lot of carbon emissions, and we want to have efficiency. Most of the fuel used in the transport sector is from fossil fuels. We want to encourage cars to use electric vehicle processes so that we can reduce—because we know that 80 percent of the energy produced in electricity is from renewable resources. I would like to commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to participating.

CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I think that this side of the House, right across the Opposition, has provided logical and reasoned arguments as to why this bill is, quite frankly, pathetic. It pains me to say it, but it is true. We are supporting it because, I think—as somebody said earlier—it does no harm. I think it was you, Tracey Martin, who said that it does no harm, and it is slight steps in a direction. But in terms of a vision, there is absolutely none. In terms of whether or not it will make any real, substantive difference to New Zealand’s emissions—probably not or certainly not in the short term. It shows no ideas—no sense of a bigger picture.

I want to get a sense of a bigger picture by reading out to the House part of an article that appeared in Newsroom—that new media, quite interesting entity—

Michael Wood: Great stories.

CLARE CURRAN: —that does quite great stories. This was written yesterday by Rod Oram, and is basically saying that New Zealand is missing a chance to transform its economy by not speeding up the move to electric vehicles, according to the head of one of the country’s big electricity generators. That is Mercury Energy chief executive officer Fraser Whineray, who says, quite rightly, that “New Zealand has secure food, water and electricity supplies but not energy freedom because we still depend on imported fossil fuels. In order for us to transition to that, electric vehicles (EVs) are an imperative.” Mercury Energy—and I will also give a big tick to Air New Zealand—is spearheading a programme to increase the number of companies switching their fleets to electric vehicles. Thirty companies have signed up to a pledge to convert 30 percent of their fleet to electric vehicles in the next 3 years.

Those are companies actually showing some oomph in this area. What this Government could be, and should be, doing is showing leadership. Instead of this piecemeal, bitsy piece of legislation, why has it not made a commitment to the public sector, to the Government fleet, to transition to electric vehicles within a certain time period? It is because it has got no vision. That is basically the point.

Let me tell you about another country that does have vision, and that is Norway. The fleet of its plug-in electric vehicles is the largest per capita in the world, with Oslo recognised as the electric vehicle capital. In July 2016—so almost a year ago—the market concentration was 21.5 registered plug-in cars per 1,000 people, which is 14 times higher than the US, which was then the country with the largest market. So I think, by earlier this year, Norway has ended up with 5 percent of all passenger cars on Norwegian roads being a plug-in. The highest ever monthly market share for electric vehicles was achieved in January this year, with 37.5 percent of new car sales.

Electric vehicles are now overtaking those monthly sales of regular cars. That is something, and that is because that Government is showing leadership. Let me read to you what the energy and resources Minister said last week in a select committee. When I put it to her “Why isn’t the Government making a policy to convert its Government fleet?”, she said “Well, good golly. That’s probably a good idea, but I don’t make the policy and, you know, I don’t really know.” And she is the energy and resources Minister.

What that tells us is that this Government has no vision—no vision, no idea, no plan. It pays lip-service. This is a lip-service bill—an absolute lip-service bill. It is pathetic. The Government has had 9 years to do something, and this is what it can come up with—9 years to do something in this area, to actually show that it means business, to show that it is committed to truly reducing emissions. We are a country that is based on hydro. We have got the resource to use for electricity. Where is the plan? Just like in so many other areas—housing, education, health, you name it—the Government has got no plan in this area, where it could be visionary. It pays lip-service. I think Sue Moroney said it was a photo opportunity. It is even worse than that. This is a pathetic piece of legislation. We are supporting it. I feel a bit embarrassed, really, to even be talking about it. So I think the Government should be truly embarrassed to be putting this before the House.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Point England Development Enabling Bill

Third Reading

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for Building and Construction): I move, That the Point England Development Enabling Bill be now read a third time. This bill is part of the Government’s comprehensive housing plan, where it is pulling every lever available to get more housing built. It is the sort of pragmatic legislation that shows it is serious about resolving the problem. It also provides the benefits of enabling the settlement with Ngāti Paoa and a plan to enhance the amenity and recreational value of this long-neglected reserve.

Let us be clear about the housing problem in Auckland: it fundamentally comes down to a lack of housing supply and, particularly, the supply of land. Labour choked off new housing developments with its 2004 changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that legally locked in Auckland’s metropolitan urban limit. That saw new home construction plummet from 12,000 a year to just 4,000 a year. We have been systematically opening up that new supply through special housing areas, through the Auckland Unitary Plan, through reforms to the RMA, and through the Crown Land Development Programme. We have achieved strong growth in new home construction for 6 straight years running—the longest and strongest construction boom in the history of Auckland. But we need to keep doing more, because New Zealand is continuing to succeed and continuing to grow. Today’s America’s Cup success will just add to Auckland being successful and attracting additional people.

Opposition parties’ response to this growth challenge is to say that it is all too hard. Mr Little has even said that we should just take a breather. Our Government is focused on the solutions that will build the houses and infrastructure to support that growth, and this bill is part of that plan. Three hundred additional homes, just 10 kilometres from the city centre, are another contribution alongside Hobsonville, alongside Tāmaki, alongside Three Kings, and many other scale developments.

The initiative for the scheme came from Ngāti Paoa in the course of their Treaty settlement negotiations. This is ancestral land that is recorded as having one of the largest Māori settlements anywhere in New Zealand in the 1820s. They fairly argued that given 18 hectares of this reserve has been grazed by cows for over 40 years, would it not be a better use for it to be for housing and a marae? The proposal is very straightforward. We send the cows packing and we free up 18 hectares. We use 2 hectares of that for a Ngāti Paoa marae, we use 12 hectares for this housing development, and we add 4 hectares for additional space for recreation and amenities.

We have further committed that all of the Government’s revenue from the housing development will be reinvested into the reserve. The toilets and the facilities on this reserve are currently a disgrace. The Ōmaru Creek through the reserve is one of the most polluted in Auckland. The playing fields have poor drainage and no lighting. This is why this is such a great opportunity—300 more homes, a 2 hectare marae, enhanced facilities, and the guaranteed retention of the 8.4 hectares of playing fields. The only downside is the loss of cows.

The part I do not get, from Labour’s opposition to this bill, is why it loves cows in the centre of Auckland so much. In other parts of New Zealand its policy is that their numbers must be capped and they must reduce their numbers, but in Auckland, Labour says that cows come before families needing housing. Actually, Labour’s position on this bill so aptly illustrates the identity crisis within the Labour Party. It opposes foreign students in low-value education and has bad-mouthed low-value education programmes, and it has then run its own one so it can get some free campaign workers. It has now even become clear that it broke immigration laws. It put students up in accommodation that would knock the very standards it promotes and demands that landlords must meet. It demands that we build more houses and then on every single housing development that is proposed, it comes out and opposes it. It has a policy of limiting cow numbers, but then it defends the grazing of cows on prime land in Auckland. It pretends that it supports Treaty settlements, and then it tries to wreck the very important Ngāti Paoa initiative.

It is these constant contradictions in Labour’s position that leave New Zealanders completely dumbfounded as to whether the once-proud Labour Party today stands for anything.

Phil Twyford: They’re dumbfounded by you.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It is time, Mr Twyford, to stop playing politics and get on with the work that will actually help resolve the issues.

Let me conclude by making plain the plan forward, after the passage of this bill this evening. The 12 hectares of land that will be freed up for housing will be added to the Crown Land Development Programme and negotiations will get under way with Ngāti Paoa on the detailed housing development. We are committed to 20 percent of the 300 homes being reserved for social housing and a further 20 percent for affordable housing, with 60 percent being set aside for market use. All of the funds generated from the housing development will be reinvested into the Point England and surrounding community facilities. The bill requires that the cows must be gone within a year. The playing area must be retained and enhanced with lighting and proper drainage. The creek will be cleaned up. We have also committed to enhanced habitat for local seabirds like the New Zealand dotterel. We are committed to working with the local community, Ngāti Paoa, and the Auckland Council to deliver on this vision.

The opposition from the Labour Party to this bill is truly pathetic. It shows that it is far more interested in politics than actually getting on resolving the issue of housing. The Opposition spokesperson has continuously challenged me, as he has the community, to think pragmatically and imaginatively on the issue of housing. This bill delivers on real gains in terms of additional housing. It gives real gains for amenity and recreation, real gains for the environment, and, fundamentally, it is about an area that has been grazed by cows, to which the public has had no access for more than 40 years, being used for housing.

I finally must note, in terms of the history of the reserve—because some have suggested that somehow it is council-owned reserve—that this reserve was bought and paid for by taxpayers, by all New Zealanders, and we in this Parliament have a duty to ensure that our land is used effectively. Quite frankly, having recreation reserve grazed by cattle for 40 years, 10 kilometres from the centre of Auckland, is not effective land use. That is why the pragmatic answer put forward by Ngāti Paoa is a very sensible and pragmatic solution for this beautiful part of the great city of Auckland. I commend the bill to the House.

PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): This is a shabby bit of politics from Nick Smith in the final 100 days of this tired National Government. Why do I say it is shabby? It is because this bill is basically about Nick Smith trying to score political points. You see, he thinks that if Labour opposes his bill to build 300 houses on a city park, it somehow undermines the criticism that we make of his failed housing policy. Well, it does not, because the failure of that Minister is writ large. His bumbling failures and utter inability to do anything about the housing crisis while the hopes of a generation of young Kiwi families go up in smoke—that cannot be diminished or diverted by the pathetic little bit of theatre that this bill is. The National Government’s legacy of record homelessness and the lowest rate of homeownership since 1951 cannot be diverted by this bill—as if building 300 houses on a city park is any kind of solution to the housing crisis.

Why else is it shabby? It is shabby because Nick Smith has dragged Ngāti Paoa into his little game, and I want to repeat for the record that Labour has no beef with Ngāti Paoa. We understand and respect their aspirations: their aspirations to settle their historical grievances, their aspiration for a place to stand. They have got a deal on the table. Why would they not take it? That is why Labour will vote for Ngāti Paoa’s settlement when it comes to this House. But I say to Nick Smith and the Māori Party that if you thought that Labour’s commitment to Treaty settlement was so shallow that we would be blackmailed into supporting a classic, half-baked Nick Smith scheme like this, then you horribly misjudged us. Labour’s commitment to Treaty settlement goes back to the Hon Matiu Rata. It is solid and enduring, but it does not mean we will go along meekly with an idea that is as misconceived and short-sighted as carving up one of the most precious open expanses of waterfront parkland in the entire city of Auckland and turning it into housing.

It is shabby because Nick Smith’s political game-playing has dragged Ngāti Paoa’s settlement into a climate of disenchantment and mistrust and cynicism in the local community—a community that feels betrayed by this Minister and this piece of legislation. It did not have to be like that.

This is a shabby bill because the Government has ignored a much better alternative. Instead of carving up this precious piece of city parkland, it could instead have offered Ngāti Paoa 12 hectares of land just over the fence from the Point England Reserve for the commercial redress part of Ngāti Paoa’s settlement. It could have offered Ngāti Paoa ownership of the entire reserve on the basis of perpetual public access. It could have offered Ngāti Paoa co-governance of the land at Point England alongside 2 hectares of land for a marae on this achingly beautiful piece of land.

It is shabby because Nick Smith has peddled falsehoods about this bill, as he is so prone to do. He says repeatedly that the land is underutilised. Well, tell that to the thousands of people who turn up for the Weet-Bix Tryathlon in the park, for movies in the park, and the generations who have played kilikiti and all manner of sports on the land that Nick Smith is taking away with this bill.

Nick Smith is obsessed with the 28 cows that have been grazing on part of this reserve. He is absolutely obsessed. He is so obsessed with cows on this land that he is passing a bill that will prohibit Auckland Council from grazing animals on the reserve that it is responsible for. I kid you not. This Minister has got his meek, sheepish colleagues voting for a bill that will ban Auckland Council from grazing cows on this reserve, as well as ordering Auckland Council to replace the three playing fields that this bill obliterates with three new playing fields, when the only space left on the reserve to put these three new playing fields is on the precious waterfront headland. This Minister needs his head read. Auckland Council says that it will not get a resource consent to do what this bill orders it to do. Once this bill is passed into law, Auckland Council faces being either in breach of the Resource Management Act (RMA) or in breach of this bill. It is unbelievable.

This is shabby because it cuts across the RMA, it cuts across the Reserves Act, when those Acts have perfectly good consultation and decision-making processes for precisely this kind of endeavour. There are established democratic procedures in place for turning over reserve land for other purposes. But no, that is not good enough for this Minister.

It is shabby because this community in Glen Innes, one of the poorest and most disadvantaged communities in Auckland, needs this parkland for future generations. This community is about to get 20,000 extra people in the next 10 years because of the Tāmaki regeneration project. Auckland is going to get another million people. That is why Auckland Council came to Parliament and said that this bill is a dangerous precedent.

It is shabby because the National Government has treated this community in east Auckland—the people of Point England, Tāmaki, and Glen Innes—with utter contempt. The Government did not consult on this plan. It sprang it on the community when this bill was tabled in the House. This bill legislates away the democratic rights of that community. The select committee was timed to receive submissions over the January summer holidays when everybody was away. The local National MP Sam Lotu-Iiga claimed in this House that he had consulted his constituents and that they supported this bill, but he refused to meet face to face with local people in his electorate who are opposed to this bill. What a shame. What a shame.

National’s candidate for the seat of Maungakiekie, Denise Lee refused to publicly debate this issue—absolutely gutless. She would not even stand up publicly and defend the policy of her party taking away 12 hectares of land from the community that she purports to represent. How disgraceful. Then we have Nick Smith coming to this House repeatedly perpetrating the lie that this land is underutilised. The reason this park has had cows grazing on it is that successive councils have not properly invested in the parkland that belongs to one of the poorest and most disadvantaged communities in Auckland. And Nick Smith has the gall to come here and use that as a justification for confiscating 12 hectares of land—unbelievable.

I want to honour the people of Tāmaki and Glen Innes and Point England who have stood up and resisted this travesty. The Save our Reserves group mobilised its community against this bill, and I want to acknowledge Tsz Ho, Shaun Lee, Jen Vella, Julie Chambers, Helen Momota, Tony Watkins, and Chris Barfoot, and 4,000 other people—many of them who once voted for the National Party—who signed the petition opposing this bill.

I also want to give special recognition to Labour’s Maungakiekie candidate, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, who stood up and told the truth. She stood up for her community, unlike the members on that side of the House who take for granted their people in that community—how appalling, how disgraceful. They should be absolutely ashamed of themselves on that side of the House.

This shabby bill will be seen for what it is. It is a tawdry bit of political game-playing by a Minister who has so spectacularly failed to build houses, who has totally failed in his responsibility as the housing Minister to do anything about the housing crisis—so stung by that humiliation—that he wants to prove to the world that he can build houses even on a treasured patch of city parkland.

ANDREW BAYLY (National—Hunua): It is a pleasure to be talking on the Point England Development Enabling Bill at its third reading. I thought it would be useful to just go back and recapture some of the essence of what this bill is about. Some of us will remember that it is the Point England recreation reserve. [Interruption]

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member who keeps calling out, and has done throughout this debate, has just had his 10-minute call, and I would ask him not to subject the rest of the House to another 50-odd minutes of that. Thank you.

ANDREW BAYLY: So the Point England recreation reserve comprises 45.43 hectares, and includes sports grounds, walkways, and other facilities for recreation. Eighteen hectares of this is used for grazing. The council administers the reserve together with an adjacent council-owned beach reserve of just under 3 hectares. Development of the land is actually on Crown-owned land, but vested in Auckland Council as a recreational reserve. The bill enables housing to be built by creating a new land parcel. This will be rezoned as residential - mixed housing urban, and it is anticipated 300 houses will be built on that area. The balance of the reserve, i.e. 32.9 hectares, will remain as a recreation reserve.

I understand that this bill is contentious and—a lot of passions and a lot of emotions. I was at Auckland when a number of submitters came and made submissions from that area. I have also been here in Parliament when they have made similar submissions, so I have a good personal understanding of the concerns. Personally, I have reflected on a number of the issues that have been raised and I am persuaded that this development should take place. The reason I have come to this—the first point is: is there a need for housing? I think it is absolutely overwhelming that there is; even the Opposition members acknowledge that.

Peeni Henare: Build them in Hunua.

ANDREW BAYLY: But we have got 13,000 sections being built in Hunua right now.

Phil Twyford: How about building on your parks in Hunua? Go and build on your own parks.

ANDREW BAYLY: If you just get off your bus and go and have a look, Mr Twyford—but this section offers the ability to build 20 percent of them for social housing, 20 percent for affordable housing, and the balance as market-related houses.

The second point is that we heard a number of submissions around protecting the New Zealand dotterel. A number of the submitters were very careful and made some good points, but I am persuaded by the local iwi, Ngāti Paoa, who have given an undertaking to improve their environment. I also note that there will be an environmental effects assessment, which will be required as part of the consent process.

The third point is that Ōmaru Creek, as the Minister Nick Smith has just mentioned, has the lowest water quality of the 36 monitored sites in Auckland. This is a nasty piece of water that is, really, a bad advertisement for all New Zealand, and Auckland, and it is great that Auckland Council has committed $40 million to upgrade this scheme. That will take part as part of this redevelopment.

The fourth thing is the use of the sports fields, and, again, I visited this site. I do not actually recall all the members from the Opposition being there on that visit that day, but 8.4 hectares of that is actually set aside for sports fields. We heard from a number of them and we have heard from officials that, in many cases, and during certain weather events, those sports fields are not available all the time. Part of this bill is that those sports fields in the same area will be made available not less than 12 months after the bill is passed—the 5.3 hectares of it—and the sports fields will be upgraded. Some of the proceeds from this change will actually be devoted to upgrading those sports fields.

Finally, there is the issue around whether it is fair and equitable that Ngāti Paoa should be given the opportunity to develop this land and to create a marae. My view is that I find it actually slightly condescending and arrogant for Opposition parties to suggest that Ngāti Paoa should not be seeking this as redress even though, as the Minister noted, and as we heard in the committee, they actually went to the Minister, went to the Crown, as part of their commitment to see a Treaty settlement. This land is absolutely essential to them.

So I am actually persuaded, on those five grounds, that this development should proceed. I think it is going to proceed in a careful manner. I do think it is going to protect the interests of the community but also bring about a substantial change and an increase in housing. On that basis, I commend the bill to the House.

PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Reo Māori, e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnei te tira ka tū, ko te tira nā Turuora, nā Rereahi, nā Korehe, nā Tūrongo; tēnā te tira, te tira oti ana! Tira ka tū, tēnā toitoi nā Haka, nā Hauā; tira ka tū, tēnā oti atu! Ko Kohukohunui te maunga, ko Pīako te awa, ko Tīkapa te moana, ko Te Haupā te tangata, ko Ngāti Paoa te iwi.

Tuatahi, māku ka rere tonu ngā mihi ki a Ngāti Paoa, ki wāna uri katoa i mātakitaki i te haerenga o tēnei pire, mai i tōna ōrokohanga tae noa mai ki tōna whakatutukitanga, ka kitea e tātau i te ahiahi pō nei. Ka rere tonu ngā mihi ki a rātou nā runga i ngā uara i whakaritea e rātau hei tūāpapa mō ngā kōrero, hei tūāpapa mō ngā mahi nui kai mua i te aroaro o Ngāti Paoa, hei kimi oranga, hei kimi hua mō ngā uri o Ngāti Paoa. Ko aua uara, ko te tika, ko te pono, ko te aroha.

[Māori language, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is the travelling party that stands, and it belongs to Turuora, Rereahi, Korehe, and Tūrongo; that is the travelling party and it is complete! The travelling party that stands and that walks briskly belongs to Haka and Hauā; the travelling party that stands is complete! The mountain is Kohukohunui, the river is Pīako, the ocean is Tīkapa, the man is Te Haupā, and the tribe is Ngāti Paoa.

The first thing for me is that the acknowledgments will continue to flow to Ngāti Paoa and to all its descendants, who are watching the journey of this bill from its beginnings right through to its conclusion, which we see this evening. Tributes will continue to flow to them as a consequence of the values they considered as a foundation for the comments and the important tasks that are before Ngāti Paoa, seeking a livelihood and seeking outcomes for the descendants of Ngāti Paoa. Those values are justice, validity, and empathy.]

Ngāti Paoa have been true to their word. Ngāti Paoa have worked with the guiding principles of tika, pono, and aroha, and I commend them for that. They made that very clear from the beginning. Those particular principles, I can say, have not been upheld by this Government. Tika, pono, and aroha in all that they did, in all that they hoped to do for their people—those principles were not upheld by this Government, and I am disappointed. I am disappointed that this particular Government has used this process to solve a crisis that it has been hiding from, ducking from, and ignoring for so long. Ngāti Paoa have been caught up in the crossfire. Ngāti Paoa, who came into all discussions with members on this side of the House and that side of the House with the principles of tika, pono, and aroha, have been bruised and have been hurt by the mechanisms put in place by this Government to see them into the housing development on Point England.

My colleague spoke of a decay of process, and that has been evident from this Government from the beginning. The scope given to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) for this particular bill was as short-sighted as this Minister. The scope given to MBIE for this bill was so limited that it shut out the entire community. In fact, the scope was so small that I am sure that the many advisers and even the Minister and the select committee were surprised to see just how many submissions were made on this bill, with most of them opposing it. They were not opposing Ngāti Paoa—not opposing Ngāti Paoa at all. In fact, they were encouraging this Government to find alternatives for them.

We offered an alternative—the Labour Party. We offered an alternative from the outset of this bill. The Government turned its nose up at it. Apparently, it knows best. It knows best! It has isolated, torn apart, and certainly left the community of Point England, Glen Innes, and Tāmaki bruised, hurt, and confused. I use all of those terms because these are the words expressed to us by that community.

This particular Government thought it was rather funny that we on this side of the House supported this bill in its first reading. We did. And it was exposed, as the bill progressed through this House—the failures of this Government.

There are a number of bills that that side of the House has supported in their first readings—some very good bills; some very good bills. In fact, one of them, funnily enough, was under the Labour administration. The Social Security (Working for Families) Amendment Bill was voted for in the first reading by that party, the National Party, only for it to vote it down through the rest of that particular bill—something about communism by stealth. Now, all of a sudden, the shoe is on the other foot. The people of Tāmaki-makau-rau are suffering from some poorly thought-out settlement mechanisms put in place across Tāmaki-makau-rau. I say that having witnessed many of those bills come through this House.

Overlapping interests—those members may beat their chests about how well they do in the Treaty settlement space. They ignored the fact that there would be people excluded, there would be people hurt, and there would be people disenfranchised. We are going to see that come to fruition under this Government in legislation of this nature. The people of Tāmaki-makau-rau deserve a housing policy that will truly see this crisis alleviated.

The member for Hunua boasted about the developments soon to take place in his electorate. I wonder whether he would agree to having a housing development built right by the falls—the pristine falls of the Hunua Range. I doubt it.

My colleague Mr Twyford has already spoken about the new park that will be established—the playgrounds and the sports fields. Well, I wonder whether, and I hope, that Minister will be there when the ball is kicked into the water, to retrieve that ball, because that is what those members are condemning the community of Tāmaki to. They may claim they have all these answers; they do not. They have failed to address this housing policy, they have failed the people of Tāmaki-makau-rau, and they have failed Ngāti Paoa. So I want to say this to my tuakana Hau.

E te tuakana, kātahi anō au ka kite atu i a koe ki roto i tō tātou Whare, e hari koa ana. I konei koe i te tīmatanga, kei konei tonu koe i tōna whakatutukitanga. Pupuru tonu koe, otirā koutou o Ngāti Paoa, ki ngā uara i whakatūāpapa e koutou i ō koutou mahi mai i te ōrokohanga o tēnei pire. Kua kōrero atu ahau mō aua uarā, ko te tika, ko te pono, ko te aroha.

Mai i a mātou o tēnei taha o Te Whare, e te tuakana e Hau, otirā, a koe hoki e Te Māngai o Te Whare, kāhore mātau e whakaae ana ki tēnei pire nā runga anō hoki i ngā uara i kōrero mai a Ngāti Paoa i te tīmatanga o tēnei pire. Nā runga i te tika, tā te mea, i hē tēnei Kāwanatanga i te hapori o Tāmaki. Nā runga ano hoki i te pono, tā te mea, kīhai te hapori o Tāmaki-makau-rau e whakapono ana ki tēnei Kāwanatanga. Ko te uara whakamutunga ko te aroha. Kei hea te aroha mō te tini, kei hea te aroha mō te mano, kei hea te aroha mō ngā tāngata katoa o Tāmaki-makau-rau?

Kāti, ka mutu atu au i konei, me tēnei kōrero atu ki a koe e te tuakana e Hau, kia kaha rā koutou ki roto i ngā mahi kai mua i a koutou. Kei konei tonu mātou me te kī atu, ā tōna wā, ka uru mai te pire tatū ai i ō koutou nawe ki mua i te aroaro o tēnei Kāwanatanga, ka tautoko mātou o tēnei taha o Te Whare i a koutou me ngā whāinga kai mua i a koutou. Kāti, e te tuakana, e Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe, tēnā koutou, kia ora tātau katoa.

[At last I have seen you, Hau, the elder sibling, in our House, and I am thrilled. You were here at the beginning and continue to be here at its conclusion. You, and indeed you collectively of Ngāti Paoa, held on to the values that you used as a foundation for the tasks you collectively worked on at the beginning of this bill. I have alluded to those values, which are justice, validity, and empathy.

From us of this side of the House, elder sibling Hau, but at the same time, you also Mr Deputy Speaker, we do not agree with this bill, because of the values that Ngāti Paoa commented on at the beginning of this bill. It was based on justice, because this Government erred with the community of Auckland. It was also based on validity, because the Auckland community did not believe in this Government. Empathy was the final value. Where is the love for the multitude, the thousands, and for all the people of Auckland?

And so I conclude here with this comment to you, elder sibling Hau: you collectively must be resolute indeed in the tasks that are before you. We will still be here, and add that when the bill returns with your grievances, which are before this Government, addressed, and it comes before the House again, we on this side of the House will endorse you and the objectives that are before you. Enough, elder sibling, and thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, my appreciation to you collectively and to us all.]

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Point England Development Enabling Bill in its third reading. I would just like to take the liberty—it is the first time I have spoken in the House today, and we are talking about an Auckland bill—to congratulate Team New Zealand and to say how synonymous the waterways of Auckland are with yachting. I must say, there are plenty in the “Waimak” who will be hoping that one day we may host it off the Waimakariri coast.

This bill is a pragmatic bill. It is a bill that will ultimately lead to more housing in Auckland. What I can say is that the sign of a good bill is a bill that can learn from history, from experience, and from previous bills, and with policy development, we call it policy transfer. So when you look at the policy post-earthquake in Canterbury, we know that if you free up land, it increases supply, which equals demand. I think that is first and foremost with this bill, which is about freeing up a parcel of land that is Crown-owned but is vested in Auckland Council—about 11 hectares, which will provide around 300 houses.

We also know, from the experience in Canterbury with the Riccarton Racecourse bill, about allowing reserve land where we can build that housing—a whole range of affordable, sociable, and private houses, which meets a need for Auckland. [Interruption] So here we hear the desperate sounds of the Opposition members, who, once again, have fallen on the wrong side of the argument, because what this bill will ultimately do is deliver more housing for Auckland. I appreciate that it is contentious. No one likes development. Waimakariri is the third - fastest-growing electorate in New Zealand. There is a lot of development, and people are, naturally, anxious when developments are built close to them—we get that. But I suppose that on this side of the House, we know that it is about making tough decisions and pragmatic decisions that will ultimately benefit New Zealanders.

Another strength of this bill is the legislative process it has followed. You know, on this side of the House, the Minister and the select committee have listened to the submitters and have understood the issues around the loss of recreational land. It was great to see that there will be an acknowledgment that that recreational land will be matched, and also the environmental impact. I have full faith in Ngāti Paoa that it will put mitigation strategies in place to address some of these concerns.

Development is always tough. People get used to their environment, and when they are told their environment is going to change, naturally there is anxiety. But I think the process we have been through has listened to that and has put strategies in place to address that. In the end, this is a pragmatic bill that will produce more housing for people in Auckland, so I commend it to the House. Thank you.

MARAMA DAVIDSON (Green): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare, huri noa ki aku hoa o tēnei Whare Pāremata, tēnā koutou katoa.

[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker, and acknowledgments to you all, my colleagues of this House, throughout.]

The Green Party will be abstaining on the Point England Development Enabling Bill, and I will be highlighting exactly why we both cannot support this flawed legislation and also cannot oppose this bill. We cannot support this flawed bill because of the terrible process, which has not taken the community with it. We acknowledge the valid concerns and pains of the community over the loss of their reserve lands and recreational space. We acknowledge the lack of good governance that sees legislation sidestep, in this case, the normal democratic processes. And, in particular, we take issue—huge issue—with this being merely an opportunity for Nick Smith to seem like he is finally doing something of substance to transform the current housing crisis and homelessness situation that we are facing, when actually it is against a backdrop of ongoing shallow and failing policies that maintain the current status quo. We cannot support the bill for that reason, as well.

We cannot support the bill because we would have preferred a clearer guarantee under the legislation, such as that of my colleague Eugenie Sage’s amendment, which would have seen the land in question retained by the Crown if Ngāti Paoa or Tāmaki iwi are unable to buy it. The amendment is to prevent it from being transferred to private developers; we would have preferred to see that guarantee.

So it is fortunate for the Minister for Building and Construction that Ngāti Paoa could see that there was a small shot at doing a far better job than the Crown than this current Government has been able to prove itself to do. When it comes to doing good for their iwi and the community, they saw a chance to take up this land. How fortunate for the Minister that they are willing to do that. It is a pretence that the Minister puts up of helping. It is a pretence, because we have seen how much the Government’s help has been worth to everybody in this country. It has not helped everyone in this country. So we cannot support it, because this is shoddy work on behalf of the Crown, and we are very clear about that.

We also cannot oppose this bill. While we do not trust the Crown, we do trust Ngāti Paoa to do the right thing by the community, to do the right thing by the whenua, Te Whanake. We trust Ngāti Paoa to do the right thing by the Ōmaru Awa. We trust Ngāti Paoa to do the right thing by the tūturiwhatu, the dotterels. This is their last shot to rectify a small part of the huge injustice that was done by the Crown obtaining these ancestral lands. The ancestral land was taken in a way that was confirmed and affirmed as a Treaty breach. The breach is that in 1841, 6,000 acres—6,000 acres—including Te Whanake, the Point England Reserve, were purchased by the Crown from Ngāti Paoa. That is all of the waterfront lands, the coveted lands that today are raking in billions of dollars for developers. Those lands were sold for £100 in cash plus £258 in goods. That is £358 in 1840. If we scale that up—and here is my amazing math—to perhaps the £34,000 that it would be worth today, with inflation, those pounds in today’s New Zealand dollars would be $60,000 for the 6,000 acres. Even if I am out by 1,000 percent—OK, let us say that is $1 million today. That was the breach: the pittance, next to the fact that the customary rights that were also extinguished through that Crown acquisition were never thought to be going to get extinguished through that sale. That is the Treaty breach.

This is Ngāti Paoa’s small, final last shot at trying to make something out of something really quite small, something that is not justice at all. But this is their shot, and they are going to do the best they can because they are connected in a way that this Crown is not to that land, to the community, to the people, to the birds, to the river. While this is not strictly Tiriti legislation, I acknowledge that Ngāti Paoa need this to go through to rectify a small part of their settlement and the injustice. I acknowledge that the letter from Chris Finlayson to Ngāti Paoa in October 2016 included a good-faith written agreement to that effect, and we will want to hold the Crown to account on that good-faith agreement, because the good-faith agreements in these Tiriti settlements have always put the burden on iwi to make sure that the Crown is held to account.

I want to go back to the Minister’s speech tonight, when he talked about his dreams for the Ōmaru River. Why has it taken till now? I have stood on the banks of that river for 5 consecutive years to support the local community in trying to get something done to fix the mamae of that tupuna awa. That community effort has not been led just by local iwi and Ngāti Paoa uri; it has been the business community, it has been non-Māori, it has been New Zealanders of the community, it has been scientists it has been school children. I have stood there for 5 years in a row—I did not see the Crown. Now, for the good fortune of the Minister, I know that Ngāti Paoa will do a better job, because the Crown has not, and this is why we cannot oppose the bill.

It is 11.69 hectares of the 45.43 hectares that will be used for housing. It is still a small part of that overall reserve. I look forward to the day, and I hope—and this is a bit of a hamuhamu plea to Haydn and Hau—that we get invited to the opening of the marae that is being proposed to be built on that land, which will be for all of the community, as marae have shown. What I do not want to see is yet another Auckland marae being used to fix up the homelessness crisis. I look forward to Nick Smith actually doing his job, so that the marae in Auckland do not have to. Otherwise, someone else, from a different party, should be that Minister.

In closing, I acknowledge the plans and the visions of Ngāti Paoa that they have for this land—that they have for this land. They are going to be left with the burden of trying to heal the community division and hurt that the Crown has created. I wish them the best of luck with doing that job—and they have to. They are not walking away. They are coming into the raruraru. So I want to send the Green Party’s support for the work that they have got ahead of them, including their incredible visions to do better with the land, with the reserve, with the river, with the birds than this Crown has ever done—than local government has ever done. So I cannot wait for those. Mr Assistant Speaker, I have outlined tonight the reasons why the Greens cannot support and cannot oppose this legislation, and I thank you for putting the Greens on record for that. Thank you.

DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): It is a very sad day indeed when this bill will pass into law—on one of New Zealand’s best days, the day we won the America’s Cup again. That is especially sad for Aucklanders, Auckland being the true home of the America’s Cup. Yet it is also a sad day for Aucklanders in that they are going to be losing such a large part of one of their best and biggest reserves—a very sad day, but also a great day, and it is just sad that this bill will blight it.

That has all been brought about by one of the saddest of all the Ministers I have seen operate in this House, and that is the “Minister of Sad” Smith. It is his Government’s totally failed housing policies that have led to this situation, driven by its hopeless immigration policies. A worse performance you could hardly imagine, and it is sad in at least five ways.

Firstly, it is sad that this Government is now so desperate for residential land and so bereft of ways to show that it is tackling the housing crisis that it is willing to do something like this. It is a sad day when the Government is willing to sacrifice such an incredibly valuable reserve, such an important area of open space so valued by Aucklanders, and its irreplaceable conservation values, which will be compromised by what is going to happen to this land—also bearing in mind the future needs of Aucklanders, as that city develops and grows, for more and more and more open space and recreation areas, especially areas of the size that this reserve is.

Thirdly, it is sad, very sad indeed, that the local people were so comprehensively sidelined from any say about the future of this land, and deliberately so.

Fourthly, it is very sad indeed that the Government has pitched local people against Ngāti Paoa by using this land as part of a Treaty settlement, but only if used for expensive residential land. What kind of settlement is it, really, when the Government says: “Yes, you can have this land as part of a Treaty settlement, but only if it’s used for housing, otherwise you won’t get it.”? “Otherwise you won’t get it.”—what kind of dictatorial settlement is that? It is not very appropriate, in our view.

Fifthly it is sad that the options for alternatives—and there were plenty—have never been properly investigated.

So it is indeed a very sad day and a very sad piece of legislation, but there is one more sadness that I will add to it. I was very sad to hear, again, that the Green Party is going to abstain from this bill because of, in my view, some utterly misplaced belief that by opposing the bill they would be opposing a fair Treaty settlement. That is simply not so—simply not so. It is also a sad day when the Greens have dimmed to such a sorrowful brown on this particular issue. In contrast, I would have to say that it is New Zealand First that has shined the brighter shade of green on this, in its unequivocal support for local people, in its undoubted upholding of their right to preserve scarce open space for sports fields and other recreational areas, and in its staunch defence of the wildlife and conservation values of the land, which the Greens apparently do not think are so important after all. Anyway, putting that aside—

Marama Davidson: You didn’t listen.

DENIS O’ROURKE: I did listen, and that is the whole point. My friend over here says I did not listen, but, in fact, I listened very closely, and I was deeply underwhelmed by what I heard: an utterly confused litany of silliness that does not result in anything positive. How on earth can anyone genuinely abstain on a bill of this nature? It just does not make sense. It is just silly, and they deserve the criticism they get for it.

But the Government’s actions over this bill are not just sad; the National Government has shown its arrogance at its very worst. It has done so by treating the local community like dirt and deliberately ignoring it—deliberately ignoring it; treating the open space provided by the reserve as just some more land that we can sell and use for housing, as though the conservation and open space values do not matter at all; treating important wildlife as though it is irrelevant, to be sacrificed on the altar of poor planning and sheer Government ineptitude; and treating the Auckland Council with disdain, not only by ignoring its submission to keep the land—and that is what the Auckland Council wanted to do, as a reserve for future recreational purposes—but also by actually taking over the council’s function in determining what the remaining areas of this reserve will be used for in the future. That is not the role of Government; that is the role of local government, and those members over there should learn the difference. They do not seem to understand.

New Zealand First has always wanted more and better housing for all New Zealanders, and especially in Auckland. For that reason, it has consistently promoted policies of Government acquisition of land for housing, of direct Government involvement in land development, and of better long-term planning by both Government and local government. It has wanted to see transport-led development to avoid more traffic congestion, it has wanted to see development of modest, affordable homes on smaller sections, and it has wanted to see much better Government assistance for first-home purchasers. It has consistently said that all along, but New Zealand First would never promote any of that at the price of the destruction of such an importance piece of reserve land. It would never do that. It would never abandon the genuine and compelling interests of local people in recreation and open space, nor would it abandon high conservation values. These are prices too high to pay.

Nick Smith has shown National in its true colours: the colour of unbelievable arrogance in the way it has treated local people; the colour of gross untruth—that the land is just being used for grazing land and nothing else, as though it will never be good for anything else, when just about everyone with half a brain knows that areas of this size and kind will be needed more and more in the future for parks and reserves as Auckland continues to grow and develop. It will be needed more and more for those purposes, and a paltry 300 houses is not anything like enough to justify ruining this reserve for that purpose. Then there is the colour of deviousness, in the way that Nick Smith has used a Treaty settlement process as an excuse to rip the guts out of one of the most important reserves left in greater Auckland.

Lastly, and just as importantly, this shows something else: it shows the bad faith of this Government, in being willing not just to sacrifice this reserve but also to create an extremely bad precedent for the future. Now Aucklanders can be sure that none of their reserves—no matter how good, no matter where they are, no matter what their purposes are—will not be at risk from this Government. They will know that a reserve does not really mean a reserve when this Government can get its hands on it. They will know these things, and they will know that when a Government is as desperate as this to show that it is finally trying to do something about the housing crisis that it created, those reserves will then certainly be at risk.

It is time for this Government to actually just give up and walk away. It has been so hopeless over housing and is now willing to sacrifice reserves of this value. A worse performance by any Government over any of these issues could not possibly be imagined. This bill should definitely not pass, and this Government must not be re-elected to do any more damage like this.

JOANNE HAYES (National): I stand to take a short call on the Point England Development Enabling Bill in its third reading. I have sat here over the last few speeches in the House, and honestly, I have never heard from that previous speaker, Denis O’Rourke, so much verbal diarrhoea in my life.

Honestly, Auckland has an issue—Auckland has an issue, and it is a housing issue. We need to be able to help Auckland people to develop some housing so they can actually house some of the people who are going to live in Auckland and/or need houses.

We have this Point England area, and we have got Ngāti Paoa there, and I have heard people say in this House that the people of Point England are now having a go at Ngāti Paoa. I do not think that they are. I have heard speakers in this House saying the people of Tāmaki-makau-rau, the people—individuals in this House cannot speak on behalf of the people of Tāmaki-makau-rau; those are only their thoughts alone.

As I stand here and talk about my thoughts to do with this particular bill, I look at some of the things that are going to be happening within the Auckland region over the next few years. We have, yes—congratulations to Team New Zealand on the America’s Cup. The America’s Cup will be based out of Auckland, and this is where the competition will be. Guess whose housing and property values are going to go skyrocketing? When we start to look at the 300 paltry houses that are going to be built on the land of Ngāti Paoa, guess what? Those values are going to go boom. They are going to go boom and the people within those houses should be feeling pretty, pretty happy with themselves and the values of those houses, let alone the value and the wealth that Ngāti Paoa will be making from their decision—their decision—to be able to build these social affordable houses.

As I look around the room and I hear that some parties are abstaining from this, I too agree with the previous speaker and other speakers that, yes, you come to this House to actually give a voice to the people and to be able to vote. You make that decision—for right or for wrong you make that decision. To abstain is nothing; it does not make it anything.

Andrew Bayly: But they want to be invited, Jo.

JOANNE HAYES: That is right, and they want to be invited to the opening of the marae.

Hon Member: Really?

JOANNE HAYES: Honestly. You may as well just go and write your own invitation, which is quite rude really. That will be the decision of Ngāti Paoa when they open the marae; nobody else will make that decision.

As I look through some of the notes from the committee’s report, I see here that the majority of the committee recommended that the bill be passed without amendment—that was the majority of the committee; that was the result of our select committee process. The majority of the committee also recognised “the need for additional housing in Auckland, and the important contribution that this bill would make towards the finalisation of Ngāti Paoa’s Treaty settlement.” These were decisions that were discussed in the select committee and have come here to this House, were presented to this House, and I have reiterated those sentiments here, the words that came out of that select committee, in the third reading of the bill. That is why I stand here proud to commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call—Eugenie Sage.

EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Well, I stand here with a heavy heart to speak to the Point England Development Enabling Bill, because the reserve that the Minister is sacrificing for housing is not small and unappreciated, as he has tried to make out with his many references to cows grazing; it is a jewel in the Tāmaki crown. It is adjacent to the Tāmaki estuary. It is adjacent to Pt England School, Glen Innes Pool and Leisure Centre, and Ōmaru Creek. It is a reserve that is highly valued by local residents. It is used for everything from kilikiti to sports games to the Weet-Bix Tryathlon and for passive recreation and open space.

Yet, this Minister, Nick Smith, has created such division and distrust in the community because of the way he has gone about this bill and prevented the community from engaging, and because of the way—and this is where I have a really heavy heart—he has burdened Ngāti Paoa with this whole sense of distrust and division. It will not be the Minister who goes in now to try to resolve that; it is going to be Ngāti Paoa who goes in and has to deal with that because of the shambles that the Minister has created with this bill.

There is that division because of the process that has been used, through the bill, to override the normal processes in the Reserves Act and in the Resource Management Act (RMA) in terms of rezoning land for residential housing. It has created anger and a lot of bitterness about the loss of this land, which is so valued and used by the community for housing development, without, potentially, even the opportunity for the community to have a say on how that housing development happens, what sort of density it has, how it is planned, how it connects with the Glen Innes shopping centre, and how it connects with transport links, because of the changes that Nick Smith has made to the RMA, which have made it so much harder for councils to notify resource consent applications for public submissions.

This bill is also really unfair on Ngāti Paoa because it is requiring Ngāti Paoa to buy the land as commercial redress but it does not give them the right to use the land as they see fit. They have to take it on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. The preconditions for purchase include the Minister’s having to agree that the development meets the Crown’s minimum requirements for both the pace of the development, the yield, and the dwelling mix, and yet it is Ngāti Paoa who has to bear the costs and the risks. The Hon Christopher Finlayson’s letter of October last year made it very, very clear that if the Crown’s preconditions for the development were not met, then the Crown was able to offer it not just to another Tāmaki iwi but could offer it to a private developer. So there is nothing in the bill that guarantees that the land will actually go to Ngāti Paoa.

The Minister has again shown his arrogance and his failure with his last-minute changes through a Supplementary Order Paper, which once again override local democracy, impose his will on Auckland Council by requiring the council to amend the management plan for the balance of the reserve, and require that at first an extra 5.3 hectares of sports fields are created there, and then that increases to an extra 8 hectares.

So we have the Minister promising in the House that the proceeds from the land sale will be used for reserve development. What are they going to be used for? To bulldoze the best remaining area of open space on the headland, at the reserve, to create more sports fields. So the community gets nothing from that. It loses area that it values and has the Auckland Council’s ability to identify other reserves in Point England where sports fields could have been created—to, instead, supplant the Minister’s will on that. As the chair of the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board said, that board normally makes decisions and plans for its parks and reserves based on community engagement. But here the Minister has substituted his decision for that of the boards and the Auckland Council. His decision pre-empts any consultation with the community. So it is setting, once again, a very dangerous precedent of legislation overriding council decision making, sacrificing this valued reserve for housing development, which the community has virtually no input into.

MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Ā, tēnā koe, otirā, e ngā mema o Te Whare nei, tēnā tātau katoa! E te iwi Ngāti Paoa, tēnā koutou, tēnei te mihi aroha ki a koe, ki a koutou mō ō koutou mahi, mō ō koutou kaha i runga i te kaupapa whakahirahira, nō reira, kei te mihi, kei te mihi, kei te mihi.

[I thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, but at the same time, acknowledgments to us all, members of this House. I congratulate you collectively, the tribe of Ngāti Paoa, and empathise with you in your efforts and energy on the matter of significance, and so my appreciation, accolades, and congratulations to you.]

It gives me no pleasure to speak against the Point England Development Enabling Bill. The Minister came into this House and he raised two issues that this bill was intended to address. First of all, he talked about the housing situation in Tāmaki. We are all clear on this side of the House that there is a housing crisis in this country. We have the largest number of homeless and, of course, the lowest rate of homeownership since the 1950s.

Secondly, he touched on the Treaty settlement, and for the time I have got in this contribution I want to focus my call in this debate on the Treaty settlement part of this bill. As a former Treaty negotiator for my father’s iwi of Rongowhakaata, it was 8 years of hard slog acknowledging people who had gone before me and the groundwork they had set out to have a full and final settlement of our Treaty settlement.

There are three parts of a Treaty settlement. One is the historical account, which tells us about the unique breaches that individual iwi—and, in this case, Ngāti Paoa—faced at the hands of the Crown. That leads to the apology, generally to acknowledge the Crown’s breaches. There are two parts in terms of remedies that iwi look for. One is cultural redress and the second one is commercial redress.

Nick Smith and this Government say that this bill is part of Ngāti Paoa’s commercial redress, but I also heard the Minister get up in this House and tell Ngāti Paoa: “If you are going to get this commercial redress, we are going to tell you what you are going to do with it.” That is what he said in this House. He said: “Not only are we going to give you this land but we are going to tell you what you are going to do with it.”

There are very few iwi who will take commercial redress from the Crown and, at the same time, be told how to use it. So I want to say to that Minister that this is a bad deal for Ngāti Paoa, because no representative of the Crown should be telling iwi what they should do with their commercial redress in settlements.

On the Local Government and Environment Committee we had two former Treaty negotiators: me and Ron Mark. I want to say to this House that during the debate in the select committee, we did raise at the select committee that we wanted to have a look at Ngāti Paoa’s Treaty settlement. Why? Because we had two members of our select committee who had gone through the process to give assurances that every possible option in terms of commercial redress was offered to Ngāti Paoa. And what happened? We were not given that information—we were not given the information.

I want to go on record and say what was in the select committee report that came back to the House. When we asked officials “Was Ngāti Paoa offered land across the road?”, we wanted to ensure that their commercial redress was honoured by what was available in terms of commercial redress. We asked specifically, and we were advised that not only was Ngāti Paoa not offered land by the Tāmaki Regeneration Co. but we were not open to any options that were explored as possible commercial redress. So here we had two very, very experienced members of the select committee, and this Government, in its arrogance to actually push this bill through, did not take the opportunity to perhaps take some advice from those people on the select committee who had experience with Treaty negotiations.

Can I just go on the record to say that by not voting for this bill, Labour is not saying that using reserves for future Treaty settlements is off the table—I must say that. That is not what this is about, because there was an alternative option here to settle Ngāti Paoa’s commercial redress. But the Crown chose not to do that.

In the last 30 seconds, can I just say that we have heard members on that side of the House from Nelson, Hunua, Waimakariri, and Christchurch speak. They are not the MPs on that side of the House from Auckland—from Tāmaki. Those members have not got up and spoken on behalf of the people from Tāmaki. I find it hugely, hugely questionable that we have got all those members from Auckland on the Government benches, and we did not hear from one of them. Auckland should be upset about it and should vote that lot out come September.

NUK KORAKO (National): Ā, mauri ora, e Te Mana Whakawā. I am proud to speak in support of the Point England Development Enabling Bill, and I am proud to be part of a Government that is passing this bill today—and I also went to school in Auckland, if that is any consolation. This particular bill here we know is not a Treaty settlement bill, but it is a wonderful opportunity post the Treaty settlement bill. The Point England Development Enabling Act and the housing that it enables will stand as a rebuke to the National Party that claims to care about housing supply in Auckland.

I am extremely excited about this bill, and so is Ngāti Paoa, and so were others of my Labour colleagues, particularly around the first reading. Let me quote one—e hoa Mr Peeni Henare: “welcome this partnership with Ngāti Paoa.” He welcomed the fact that his bill will not only provide extra housing in Auckland but will provide land for a new marae. Ka pai. I also want to tautoko Carmel Sepuloni’s comments that Labour will support any piece of legislation that is going to be about building more affordable houses in Auckland. If only those members meant it. In fact, Labour has opposed every single development that is getting more affordable homes built in Auckland.

If you ask me, I think Carmel Sepuloni was telling the truth. I think Peeni Henare really does have the best interests for his constituents in Tāmaki Makaurau at heart. But they have been overruled by a leader and a housing spokesperson whose first strategy on housing was “no more Chinese-sounding surnames”, and whose next big idea is overruling a partnership with iwi so that he can keep more cows grazing in the city.

I want to finish by paraphrasing Su’a William Sio. This bill, he said, “is not just about building houses. It is about recognising what this is for strong, healthy, safe families.” This is what this National-led Government is about, particularly on housing. Nō reira, e mihi atu ki a koutou katoa, and I strongly support this bill in the third reading. Kia ora.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): There has been much spoken about this bill in this House from the other side tonight that bears little relationship to the truth or what is actually in the bill. I want to start off my remarks by being very clear about the Labour Party’s position. We appreciate the need for more housing in Tāmaki, but we also believe that it is important to balance that demand with good urban design and public open spaces. That is a view that we have on this issue. Funnily enough, that is also the view—

Hon Anne Tolley: And cows. A place for the cows.

MICHAEL WOOD: —thank you, Mrs Tolley—of one Denise Lee, the National Party - aligned councillor for Maungakiekie-Tāmaki and the National Party candidate for the seat of Maungakiekie, as of 20 January. That is the view that she expressed at that time, standing shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Phil Goff, when she thought she could get away with making those sorts of comments. What Denise Lee was pointing out there was the fact that these matters are complex. They require engagement, they require listening, and they require careful examination and a proper consideration of all of the alternatives, to meet the needs of all of the people who are at the table.

But, instead, what we have got in this bill is a “Nick Smith special”—a piece of legislation that has been rammed through. In my comments I want to focus on the utter failures of process that destroy the integrity of this bill, regardless of its contents. Then, in respect of the substance of the bill, I want to talk about the fundamental importance of this piece of open space to the community in Maungakiekie-Tāmaki. I also want to speak about the alternative that was not explored, and that is the unspoken—and it will be the spoken—tragedy of this whole episode.

Before going on, I want to acknowledge the local community, who have fought, and fought not just for themselves but for the other people of their community and for future generations, in the interest of high-quality open space that will be there for everyone. I want to acknowledge colleagues in New Zealand First, who have stood with the Labour Party in opposing this bill as well. I want to acknowledge the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board and Labour candidate Priyanca Radhakrishnan in Maungakiekie, who have led the charge in supporting the community on the ground when they have felt powerless and locked out by an arrogant Government.

Let us start by talking about the process for this bill, and it is actually extraordinary—it is a total disgrace. It was dumped on the community just prior to Christmas last year—just prior to Christmas. So while Nick Smith and most other MPs were off enjoying their summer holidays in January, that was the only chance that the local community had to gather together to actually be consulted about this before we got into the formal process. So they gathered on something like 20 January. The local board stepped up where this Government failed to engage with the community. That is what they did. They got together and they came up with their views on this, and they immediately recognised that there was a failure of process and a risk to their high-quality open space. The local board had to hold meetings in the middle of the summer holiday to consult with the community. That was the starting point in terms of the egregious process of this bill, and it just got worse.

The chair of the Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board, Josephine Bartley, was very clear that there was no public consultation from the Government about this bill at the beginning, and she said that “If there was public consultation the Minister would have heard for himself from the people about how well used the sports fields are. We have groups like the Samoan community [who] have been playing kilikiti on those fields for the past 35 years.”, and the examples just go on and on from the community.

Something that I think is disgraceful is that in the Cabinet paper about this bill, which most of the National Government backbenchers who have spoken probably have not even sighted, the department says in that Cabinet paper that this bill would be divisive and that it would create a divide between the community and Ngāti Paoa. That was the advice that Minister Nick Smith got, and I would have thought that any responsible Government that received that advice would have taken a breath and would have thought about consultation and engagement and working this through, instead of charging through like the red-faced bull in a china shop that we always get from that Minister in this House. I think it is a disgrace.

The Auckland Council, in a submission the likes of which I have never seen before in terms of its language, described this bill as a dangerous precedent, because it is about central government running amok, running over the legitimate expectations that people have to be consulted. It cuts across multiple Acts—the Reserves Act, which sets out processes for communities and local government to be consulted before we have changes to our reserves. It cuts across the Resource Management Act, unbelievably, after the people of Auckland spent the best part of 2 or 3 years being consulted about the future urban form of Auckland and about what kind of housing should go where.

Simply by fiat in a couple of sentences in this bill, we have decided that a piece of reserve land will have a kind of housing called mixed-housing urban just dropped on it—it is three storeys high and medium density—just like that, cutting across entirely the kind of plan-change processes that every other citizen can expect when there is a change in their community, and that is also a disgrace.

Andrew Bayly spoke smoochingly in his speech about Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 321 dropped in by Nick Smith at the Committee stage to put additional sports fields on sensitive ecological land on the headland of Point England Reserve. That was put there in a desperate bid to try to save Denise Lee an extra 500 or so votes that she might have lost as a result of this barbarous legislation. That piece of legislation speaks to the problem.

Let us have a look at the bill itself. One of the things that it says, and we have had this put up as a defence from the National Government, is that in clause 9 of the bill there are obligations for the Minister to consult with the community and local government about what might happen next. But here we have Supplementary Order Paper 321 inserting clause 10, put in by fiat by the Minister in the Committee of the whole House with no consultation—no consultation—with anyone, telling Auckland Council that it has to do something that it, in fact, probably cannot do and that it probably cannot get a resource consent for. I have come from a council background. I can tell you that you cannot actually plan and consent and build a modern, high-quality sports field in the space of 12 months, which is what Nick Smith’s ridiculous SOP adds into this bill.

Listening to Nick Smith telling us and expecting us to believe that there will be consultation with the community after this bill is like believing Attila the Hun telling us that he will settle his disputes through a family group conference. What I say to the members on that side is that the National Party once had a proud tradition of following the rule of law, of following due process, of working with communities, and of doing things incrementally. Where is the party of Jim McLay? Where is the party of Ralph Hanan? Where is the party of Jack Marshall? Those were once Attorneys-General of that party, who would have put their foot down and said: “No. This is wrong. We’re going to follow the processes that are on our statute book.”

What I say to the Māori Party members, who have supported this bill right the way through, is when has it ever been good for Māori for central government to cut across the rule of law, to cut across due process, to cut across public consultation, and to cut across access to the courts? Let us be very clear that the way in which this bill cuts across the RMA and the Reserves Act, and cuts across the rights of access to the courts that members of the community would otherwise enjoy—when has that precedent ever served Māori in this country well? Yet they are voting for that tonight.

Coming to the substance of public open space, when the people of Auckland went through the exercise of the unitary plan—and noting that none of the National members who have stood up and spoken tonight have been members of urban Auckland electorates—Auckland came to a difficult decision that we would advance with a quality compact city. We would accept intensification, because we knew that that was what needed to happen to cater for growth and to give people decent housing. That was a difficult decision for Auckland, but we got there. But we also said that, when we did it, it had to be done in a quality way. That was the bargain: that as we intensify, as communities like Tāmaki accept 20,000 more people over the next 10 years - plus—

Hon Dr Nick Smith: Oh, the man opposed to housing.

MICHAEL WOOD: —that they will also have decent amenities—nice of you to return, Minister—and quality open space. That is part of the deal that Auckland made, and I am not going to accept being lectured to by a Minister who has presided over the housing crisis, and National Government Ministers, none of whom would accept the reserves lands in their electorates being carved up for housing like this.

Hon Dr Nick Smith: What’s happened in Riccarton? What happened in Riccarton?

MICHAEL WOOD: Minister Nick Smith, I do wonder how you would feel about Rutherford Park or Branford Park in your electorate being carved up for housing. I wonder how the member for Hunua would feel about Rosa Birch Park in his electorate being carved up for housing. Yet we have these Ministers from outside of Auckland telling Aucklanders how their city should grow and telling Aucklanders that their parks and reserves are fair game. That is a disgrace, and those members and that party will pay the price for that on 23 September, no less anywhere than in the Maungakiekie electorate, where former members of the National Party have joined me on the protest line and joined Priyanca Radhakrishnan on the protest line to protest this abomination of a bill.

On process grounds and substance grounds this bill is an absolute dog. I proudly stand with the community of Maungakiekie against it and urge all members to vote it down. Thank you.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Point England Development Enabling Bill be now read a third time.

Ayes 62

New Zealand National 58; Māori Party 2; ACT New Zealand 1; United Future 1.

Noes 43

New Zealand Labour 31; New Zealand First 12.

Abstentions 14

Green Party 14.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Land Transfer Bill

Third Reading

Hon MARK MITCHELL (Minister for Land Information): I move, That the Land Transfer Bill be now read a third time. This is a huge milestone in land transfer law reform. For over 60 years New Zealand’s land transfer system has been underpinned by the Land Transfer Act 1952, a piece of legislation containing many archaic provisions, some dating back more than 100 years. But things have moved on. New Zealand boasts a modern, state-of-the-art electronic land transfer system, in which people can buy and sell properties with very little red tape or complication. It is also world renowned, consistently rating highly in World Bank reports on ease of doing business, and in the latest report New Zealand was ranked first in the world for ease of registering property.

The bill will align the legislation with modern practice by simplifying and modernising the language. It also shifts the emphasis from paper-based to electronic transactions. But be assured that we are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The bill carries over much of the substance of the current law. It retains the core principles of the Torrens system of land registration and sets these out clearly in the purpose statement. These principles include indefeasibility of title. This is a fundamental aspect of the Torrens system, which provides that, in general, once registered, a transaction cannot be set aside. However, the bill also recognises that in some circumstances, indefeasibility of title can result in unfair outcomes. To address this problem and improve security of property rights, the bill gives the High Court discretion in certain circumstances to order the alteration of the land titles register, to avoid manifest injustice.

I welcome the changes made by the Government Administration Committee, which clarify that the threshold for manifest injustice is very high. They also make it clear that court orders can be made under these provisions only in exceptional circumstances, when compensation cannot properly address the injustice. The bill also improves the Crown compensation scheme for those who lose land, or an interest in land, through the operation of the land transfer system. These changes will make the scheme fairer for landowners and the Crown.

Currently, compensation is based on land value at the date of loss. This can be unfair. Loss can take some time to discover, and the compensation, in that case, would not cover an increase in property value or improvements made to the property in the interim. The bill addresses this problem by providing for compensation to be based on the value of the land at the date when the claimant discovers, or should reasonably have discovered, the loss. In most cases, the new compensation formula will result in claimants receiving more compensation from the Crown. The court will, however, have discretion to change the valuation date, to avoid an unfair outcome. For example, the discretion could be used to value the property at the date of judgment, when the claim is made in a rising market. It allows the valuation at the date of discovery to be used where the claimant unreasonably delays making the claim, or where the claim is made in a falling market.

The bill shifts some certification requirements from the Act to regulations, making it easier to automate more transactions and update requirements to keep pace with changing technology. Another efficiency measure in the bill is a new, simplified process for claiming landownership on a limited title, on the basis of adverse possession. The reforms enable greater efficiency and flexibility for land developments through mechanisms such as land covenants.

Finally, the bill extends the statutory powers of the Registrar-General of Land to withhold an individual’s personal information, for the protection of the personal safety of landowners and their families. I would like to thank again the members of the Government Administration Committee and its chair, the Hon Ruth Dyson, for their work and thorough consideration of the bill. I also want to thank all of those people and organisations that contributed to the development of the bill through various consultation processes at the select committee stage. In particular, I want to thank the New Zealand Law Society and the Auckland District Law Society. I also want to take this opportunity to thank my officials at Land Information New Zealand. Their hard work and commitment to this bill have been greatly appreciated. I wish to thank the Law Commission and particularly acknowledge the contribution of George Tanner QC, the commissioner responsible for the review of the Land Transfer Act. I also want to acknowledge the contribution made by Warren Moyes, former Wellington District Land Registrar and Land Information New Zealand official. Sadly, both George and Warren have since passed away.

As the previous Minister for Land Information said in her first reading speech, land underpins everything. The ability for people to buy and sell land easily, and have confidence in the security of property rights, is vital for economic and social well-being. I am confident that the Land Transfer Bill will enable those transacting in land to do so with greater confidence and certainty, and I commend the bill to the House.

RAYMOND HUO (Labour): I would like to thank the Hon Mark Mitchell, the new Minister for Land Information, who has just resumed his seat. The Land Transfer Bill is to amend the Land Transfer Act 1952 and other relevant pieces of legislation, and it will become the new principal Act in this area. The law change is well overdue, and the bill will bring the key piece of property legislation into the 21st century.

From the Law Commission issues paper released in 2008 to the Law Commission report A New Land Transfer Act in 2010, followed by consultation with stakeholders, the bill was introduced in February 2016. This is certainly a long time in gestation. For many stakeholders involved, those from either the legal fraternity or banking institutes, the journey is truly a labour of love. For someone like myself who is from a legal background, it is a privilege to get involved in the process of seeing the bill get through the Committee of the whole House process and the current third reading. For someone like myself who has just returned to the House, it is more like that this bill has offered me a great opportunity to exercise the politicians’ art of arriving late but claiming all of the credit. However, I should acknowledge the contributions by previous and current presidents of the Law Commission, Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Professor John Burrows QC. I would also like to acknowledge Land Information New Zealand, which produced such a thoughtful departmental report, and the Hon Ruth Dyson, the able chair of the Government Administration Committee. The committee heard all of the submissions and did a thorough analysis and presented the bill to the House in its current form.

The primary purpose of this bill is to produce a piece of legislation that is centred on electronic registration. The second objective of reform is to ensure that the new Act is acceptable and written in plain, modern English. The bill continues and maintains the Torrens system of land title in New Zealand. The bill also makes changes to land law aimed at improving security of property rights and efficiency, including indefeasibility of title, identity verification, and other issues related to encumbrances and covenants in gross. The bill also introduces a new power for the High Court, to alter the land register in case of manifest injustice, which in turn has the potential for profound impact on banks and other lenders who lend money on the security of land.

During the Committee of the whole House we also looked at some Supplementary Order Papers, with one calling for a mechanism to be established to create a foreign buyers register. The National Government’s current position is not helpful. Listening to the questions and answers during today’s question time between Mr Phil Twyford MP and the honourable Minister Nick Smith, one could not help but wonder for how long the Minister could carry on insisting that the current way of collecting data is good and conclusive.

We have three problems with the Land Information New Zealand data. Even the Minister at the time admitted that the data was not inclusive and should not be viewed as a foreign buyers register. Those figures were based on the low side of the market. They were collected after the introduction of the new IRD disclosure rules in May 2015. The data did not, and will not, include trusts and business buyers.

The dilemma is that, on the one hand, we have a housing crisis and, on the other, nobody knows about the scope and size of foreign ownership of New Zealand residential properties. The population in Auckland has gone up by 45,000 a year. We need about 15,000 or so houses a year, and we are building about half that number. Supply is falling far short of demand, and that puts prices up. But notwithstanding that piece of political context, the substance of this bill heads in the right direction and updates the land transfer law.

Can I commend the good work of the Government Administration Committee again for its efforts in considering the bill. I also want to thank the submitters, such as the New Zealand Law Society, the Auckland District Law Society, the New Zealand Bankers’ Association, and the New Zealand Institute of Valuers, etc., for their thoughts, concerns, and contributions.

This bill is a long overdue update of the land transfer mechanism and is a restatement of the core principles that govern indefeasibility of title and our Torrens system of land registration. As Professor Geoffrey Palmer said, the Land Transfer Act is a basic part of the New Zealand legal infrastructure. An effective system for land transfer is essential for the workings of a modern economy. Much of the bill is technically laden and could be very dry, but detail matters in the land transfer system. The Law Commission and Land Information New Zealand have managed to make this bill clear, modern, and effective. Labour supports this bill.

PAUL FOSTER-BELL (National): It is an absolute delight to take a call in this third reading debate on the Land Transfer Bill in the name of my fine and very virtuous colleague the Minister for Land Information, the Hon Mark Mitchell, who I have to say is doing such a magnificent job in this area. I welcome the contribution made by the speaker who resumed his seat, Raymond Huo. He is far more expert than I am, as a practising lawyer prior to coming into this House, but I do want to just, I think, clarify a couple of points that the member did bring up, but perhaps he couched them in language that people such as myself with only a rudimentary and unsophisticated understanding of land transfer law might be able to understand.

As has been mentioned, the Land Transfer Act from 1952 is over 60 years old, and it has to be read in concert with the 1963 amendment Act, but also a 2002 computer registration Act, two of which are administered by the Ministry of Justice and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)—the latter of which, the 2002 computer registry Act, is administered only by LINZ. So in consolidating these Acts and putting them into one piece of law, it certainly makes it much more efficient and streamlined for people who are dealing in the very important matter of transferring land. This is because, of course, we have to remember that the principal source of wealth in this country is the land.

I think this Government has done an excellent job on taking aboard the constructive suggestions made by groups such as the Bankers’ Association and the Law Society in ensuring that this bill is fit for purpose. I particularly want to congratulate the Minister for Land Information, the Hon Mark Mitchell, on outlining in his Supplementary Order Paper (SOP)—that is, SOP 323—a couple of very important changes that did amend well-intentioned but slightly problematic clauses in the original draft of the legislation.

The areas that I think are particularly important are those around identity verification—so we have seen clauses 54 and 55 of the original bill deleted. This is important as that had the potential, as we were informed on the select committee, to add several thousand dollars of additional and unnecessary legal expenses to the cost of conveyancing a land transfer. Similarly, I welcome the clarification of the intention of Parliament in terms of manifest injustice provisions. It is very clear now to the courts—and I hope that it is recorded on the record tonight—that our intention as a Parliament is that the discretion to set aside a registration of land is something that is to be used only in exceptional circumstances and very, very rarely.

Why is this important? Well, indefeasibility—that is, the surety we have that once land is registered in the Torrens system it is properly registered and it is owned by the person who is registered as owning it—is important for us as a country where many people go and take out mortgages and want to get their mortgages at a reasonable rate. If those who lend us money can have no surety that their loan is going to be protected and that registration is watertight, then we are at risk of paying a lot more for that credit than otherwise we would. So I think it is very important to ordinary New Zealanders who have been enjoying very low interest rates under this National Government that we do not add on extra administration costs for registering land and that we certainly do not do anything to make the cost of securing credit—that is, the cost of people’s mortgages—any higher than it needs to be.

This is something that has certainly been taken on board by this Government, which I have to say is a Government that does listen to the concerns brought to it, and this Government, this National-led Government, certainly has a concern for those who are paying their mortgages, doing the right thing, trying to own a home on behalf of themselves, a place to bring their families up—the vast majority of ordinary New Zealanders—and we are, I think, doing an excellent job of meeting the needs of those ordinary New Zealanders.

A couple of other slightly obscure points. The member mentioned that the bill will allow covenants in gross to be noted on the title. Just to clarify what that precisely means, a covenant in gross is an enforceable agreement related to land use. We can think of lots of examples around covenants or easements. But the new mechanism that has been introduced will allow a much cheaper and quicker alternative than the current practice of registering the encumbrances on a separate register, because we know that this can slow down land developments. So if someone is interested in acquiring a piece of land and they look up the title, they will be able to find any enforceable agreements and encumbrances on that land very clearly registered. That will make for a far easier, more efficient process for land development.

The bill also introduces, for the first time, a definition of fraud, which was not defined in the 1952 Act. As a number of eminent people, including my colleague the Hon Judith Collins, have pointed out, New Zealand has, probably, one of the finest land registry systems in the world. There are almost no cases of mortgage fraud; that is what we were told by the banks in New Zealand. But the Torrens system that we have in New Zealand—it is derived, actually, as others have pointed out, from the system devised by Sir Robert Richard Torrens GCMG, the third Premier of South Australia. It is a system devised in our part of the world, and it is infinitely superior to the old system of actually having titles and deeds locked up in little wooden boxes at home to prove your ownership. It is title by registration, not the registration of title. It is a very secure system, and this bill makes it even better—it futureproofs it, makes it more efficient, and gives people greater surety.

We have had a select committee, the Government Administration Committee, that has worked very hard on this, and I welcome Matt Doocey from Waimakariri to the committee, but I also would note that Brett Hudson, my colleague, the list MP from Ōhāriu, was on the committee throughout the hearings and made ample and fulsome contributions. It is a very good bill, and I commend it fully to the House.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I acknowledge the member who has just resumed his seat, Paul Foster-Bell. He is the deputy chair of the Government Administration Committee. He did not praise himself, as I am sure he is not inclined to, but I want to commend his work in that committee on this bill.

I want to commend the Minister for Land Information who introduced the bill—and I am sorry, but that was not the Hon Mark Mitchell; it was actually the Hon Maurice Williamson.

Hon Members: Who?

Hon RUTH DYSON: These new ones are saying “Who?”. That is very unkind. The Hon Maurice Williamson is still a member of this House; he is not due to give his valedictory speech for another 7 or so weeks. He started this process. He welcomed it in 2010, alongside the Hon Simon Power, who has gone on to greater and better things—now working for a bank, I understand.

But what a relief it must be for the National Government to be debating something as dry and technical as the Land Transfer Bill, where everyone is in agreement, after the week it has had. I could not have imagined a better scenario for the Opposition party—for us—going into the National Party’s annual conference, going into its weekend conference. What a week, which was not a good week, did they ever have. Moving on to debate the Land Transfer Bill must be just a blessed relief at this time.

Even though this was a good bill, emanating from a fine piece of collaborative work from the Law Commission, from Crown Law, and from the New Zealand Law Society, it still leaves a big hole in the land registration process unfilled. I want to challenge the new Minister for Land Information, who has made a fine effort to get on top of the details of this bill—in fact, I think he was on the select committee when we heard the submissions, so he may well have had an advantage going into his ministerial role, but, either way, he is on top of the detail; you could tell from his third reading speech. I want to challenge him to fix the hole that has been left unfixed by his predecessor, and that is the absolute shambles in the Overseas Investment Office.

It is just a mess. It has become a laughing stock. If the Minister is not careful, it will drag him down with it, and I do not think that should happen. If the Minister is visionary, and bold, and courageous, he will be able to make something out of the mess that is the current Overseas Investment Office. We have seen where it is not even able to access robust databases in which we can have confidence, and get information for us. The Hon Mark Mitchell’s predecessor decided to respond to the shambles of the Overseas Investment Office by making the shambles work faster—just speeding up the wet-bus-ticket consent process. That is not good enough for a country that prides itself on transparency and openness, and it is not good enough for the Minister to let the Overseas Investment Office get away with this. So that is my challenge. While supporting this legislation, it does not address the biggest problem that that Minister is facing.

As I mentioned earlier, this bill is a result of a very good bit of collaborative work done by the Law Commission, Crown Law, and the New Zealand Law Society. The primary aim was to modernise the legislation—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.